‘That’s the trouble,’ Nicholas interrupted her bitterly. ‘I’ve allowed her to make a doormat out of me for too long. I’m sick and tired of her carping, her criticisms, of being held up to ridicule … of being made to feel a fool. I’ve already told her that if she doesn’t love me any more then we should separate. Even though, for the children’s sake, I feel … Anyway that isn’t what she wants … or so she says. In fact, she got so wrought up when I suggested it that I began to wonder if I could perhaps make her jealous, make her believe that another woman was interested in me … a woman who didn’t despise me or constantly compare me with another man. She’s always had a very jealous nature … and it’s obviously worked better than I imagined.’
Tania couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘You mean you deliberately allowed Clarissa to believe that you and I are having an affair, even though there’s not the slightest truth in such a suggestion?’ she asked, appalled.
Nicholas had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘I’d no idea she’d take things so far. I didn’t say we were having an affair. I just talked to her about you, told her how much I admire you … You know the kind of thing. I had no idea she’d involve James. I suppose I ought to have done, though. She’s forever running to him with her problems. He’s more important to her than I am—’ He broke off, flushing and biting his bottom lip, and Tania recognised that Clarissa wasn’t the only one suffering from jealousy.
Something unpleasant and distasteful stirred deep inside her at what she was hearing.
‘You’ll have to tell her the truth,’ she announced flatly. ‘And you have to tell your brother-in-law as well.’
He had gone pale and was avoiding her eyes.
‘I will do,’ he told her. ‘But not just yet. If I can just get her to realise—’
‘No,’ Tania protested. She was furious with him. How dared he use her like this and without either her knowledge or her consent? ‘I can understand that you want to save your marriage,’ she told him firmly. ‘But I don’t believe this is the right way to go about it. What’s wrong with simply sitting down and discussing the whole thing honestly with Clarissa? Tell her that you love her and that you resent being compared with her brother. Tell her that you want to make a success of your marriage. After all, you’ve every incentive to do so, both of you. You must have loved each other when you married … you have two beautiful children.’
‘One of whom was conceived before we were married,’ Nicholas told her, astounding her. ‘Oh, I wanted to marry her. I was desperately in love with her, but Clarissa … Well, I’ve never been sure whether she married me because she loved me or because she was pregnant. Sometimes I even wonder if Alec is mine. You see, she was involved with another man—a married man—when we first met. She was using me to prevent James from finding out about her affair. He’s very strict about such things, very moralistic.’
Tania felt sickened by what she was hearing. Mingled with that sickness was pity for Nicholas, tinged with a little contempt, and as for Clarissa …
‘You’re going to have to tell her the truth, Nicholas,’ she insisted curtly. ‘Your brother-in-law has given me twenty-four hours in which to make up my mind about his bribe. After that if I refuse to give you up he assured me that he will find some way of making me do so.
‘He’s a very powerful man locally. I can’t afford to have him as my enemy, no matter what my private opinion of a man who accepts the accusations of someone without making the slightest attempt to find out for himself if they’re true. I can’t help you with your marriage, I’m afraid, and, to be honest with you, if you don’t make sure that he knows the truth, then I shall.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas told her, ‘but it won’t be easy convincing Clarissa.’
‘Really?’ Tania was coldly, icily angry with him now. ‘You do surprise me. You appeared to have no difficulty in convincing her that we were having an affair. Surely informing her of the truth should be even more easy?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas reiterated, but, as she saw him out, Tania wished she could have felt more confident of his determination to make sure Clarissa knew and accepted the true situation between them.
As he got in his car to drive away, she called out urgently to him, ‘So you’ll make sure she knows everything, won’t you, Nicholas?’
The smile he gave her was forced and painful, but she dared not allow herself to waste any sympathy on him. He certainly had not spared a thought for her when he had so recklessly and unwisely involved her without her knowledge in his private affairs.
She had gone from feeling sorry for him for the sad state of his marriage to feeling that perhaps he and Clarissa deserved one another after all. She had nothing but contempt for adults who so cruelly played childish games with one another’s emotions.
Surely any good marriage—any worthwhile relationship—demanded total trust, mutual respect, mutual honesty, if that feeling that the human race described as love was going to be allowed a chance to grow to maturity.
If the kind of relationship Nicholas and Clarissa shared was marriage, commitment, then she was glad she had never experienced it.
But then she thought of Lucy, Lucy whom she was perhaps unwittingly denying a very important part of her growing up. Would her daughter as an adult have difficulty in relating to the male sex? Would she have emotional problems and hang-ups because of her lack of a male parent, a male influence in her life?
Uncomfortably she dismissed her thoughts as unproductive, but, later on that evening when Lucy was chatting animatedly about her afternoon at the Fieldings’, describing to her how Tom Fielding was making his daughter her very own personalised stencil for decorating her newly painted bedroom walls, she wondered if she was being over-sensitive in detecting a trace of wistful envy in her daughter’s voice. Lucy’s room in their new flat, while a tenfold improvement on the claustrophobic and damp room she had occupied in their city tower block, was as yet undecorated. Because of the necessity of opening in time for the autumn term trade in new school shoes, there hadn’t been time to do very much as yet with the flat. Once the shop was open and running, then she would be able to turn her attention to making their new home more comfortable.
She had plenty of ideas, plenty of plans, and, determinedly trying to banish James Warren and his threats from her mind, she tried to concentrate instead on discussing with Lucy just how they would decorate her new room.
After Lucy had had her bath and gone contentedly to bed, Tania looked around her sitting-room, mentally giving the plain walls a coat of fresh sunny yellow paint. A pretty stencil frieze around the top of the walls would add a little individuality to the décor; she had taught herself a good many domestic skills over the years, out of necessity more than anything else, and she eyed their comfortable settee she had originally bought second-hand, recognising that it was perhaps time it had a new loose cover, perhaps in a plain damask this time now that Lucy was growing up and the importance of a fabric which would not show every mark was no longer essential. Because her great-aunt had refused to modernise the building in any way, the flat still retained its open fireplaces with their nineteenth-century firebacks.
Worth a fortune now, Ann Fielding had told her enviously, and well worth keeping.
In addition to its two good-sized bedrooms, the sitting-room, the small room she had turned into her study and the bathroom, the flat also had a kitchen-cum-dining-room, but ultimately Tania hoped to extend the rear ground floor of the building to provide Lucy and herself with a downstairs kitchen with french windows they could open out on to a small courtyard for summer eating.
That, however, was for the future. For the present … Grimly she stared out of her sitting-room window, for once oblivious to the view across the open countryside.
She was furious with Nicholas for involving her in what should