‘You say that you’ve always been open and honest with me, Emily, but that isn’t the truth, is it?’
Emily’s heart somersaulted with slow, sickening despair. He knew? Somehow he had guessed what she was thinking and—almost as bad—she could see he was spoiling for an argument… because that would give him an excuse to end things.
‘Remember the night I took you to dinner and you told me about your marriage? Remember how “open” you were with me then—and what you didn’t tell me?’ Marco recalled sarcastically.
Emily couldn’t speak. A mixture of relief and anguish filled her. Her marriage! All this time she had thought—believed—that Marco had understood the scars her past had inflicted on her, but now she realised that she had been wrong. ‘It wasn’t deliberate, you know that,’ she told him, fighting not to let her voice tremble. ‘I didn’t deliberately hold back anything.’ Why was he bringing that up now? she wondered. Surely he wasn’t planning to use it as an excuse to get rid of her? He wasn’t the kind of man who needed an excuse to do anything, she told herself. He was too arrogant to feel he needed to soften any blows he had to deliver.
Marco looked away from Emily, irritated with himself for saying what he had. Why had he brought up her marriage now, when the last thing he wanted was the danger involved in the sentimentality of looking back to the beginning of their relationship? But it was too late, he was already remembering…
He had taken Emily to dinner, setting the scene for how he had hoped the evening would end by telling her coolly how much he wanted to make love to her and how pleased he was that she was a woman of the world, with a marriage behind her and no children to worry about.
‘Just out of interest,’ he’d quizzed her, ‘what was the reason for your divorce?’ If there was anything in her past, he wanted to know about it before things went any further.
For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse to answer him. But then her eyes widened slightly and he knew that she had correctly interpreted his question, without him having to spell it out to her. She clearly knew that if she did refuse, their relationship would be over before it had properly begun.
When she finally began to speak, she surprised him with the halting, almost stammering way in which she hesitated and then fiddled nervously with her cutlery, suddenly looking far less calm and in control than he had previously seen her. Her face was shadowed with anxiety and he assumed that the cause of the breakdown in her marriage must have been related to something she had done—such as being unfaithful to her husband. The last thing he expected to hear was what she actually told him. So much so, in fact, that he was tempted to accuse her of lying, but something he saw in her eyes stopped him.
Now Marco shifted his weight from one foot to the other, remembering how shocked he’d been by the unexpected and unwilling compassion he had felt for her as she’d struggled to overcome her reluctance to talk about what was obviously a painful subject…
‘I lost my parents in a car accident when I was seven and I was brought up by my widowed paternal grandfather,’ she told him.
‘He wasn’t unkind to me, but he wasn’t a man who was comfortable around young children, especially not emotional young girls. He was a retired Cambridge University academic, very gentle and very unworldly. He read the classics to me as bedtime stories. He knew so much about literature but, although I didn’t realise it at the time, very little about life. My upbringing with him was very sheltered and protected, very restricted in some ways, especially when I reached my early teens and his health started to deteriorate.
‘Gramps’ circle of friends was very small, a handful of elderly fellow academics, and…and Victor.’
‘Victor?’ Marco probed, hearing the hesitation in her voice.
‘Yes. Victor Lewisham, my ex-husband. He had been one of Gramps’ students, before becoming a university lecturer himself.’
‘He must have been considerably older than you?’ Marco guessed.
‘Twenty years older,’ Emily agreed, nodding her head. ‘When it became obvious that my grandfather’s health was deteriorating, he told me that Victor had agreed to look after me after…in his place. Gramps died a few weeks after that. I was in my first year at university then, and, even though I’d known how frail he was, somehow I hadn’t…I wasn’t prepared. Losing him was such a shock. He was all I had, you see, and so when Victor proposed to me and told me that it was what Gramps would have wanted, I…’ She ducked her head and looked away from Marco and then said in a low voice, ‘I should have refused, but somehow I just couldn’t imagine how I would manage on my own. I was so afraid…such a coward.’
‘So it was a marriage of necessity?’ Marco shrugged dismissively. ‘Was he good in bed?’
It continued to irk Marco to have to admit that his direct and unsubtle challenge to Emily had sprung from a sudden surge of physical jealousy that the thought of her with another man had aroused. But then sexual jealousy wasn’t an emotion he’d ever previously had to deal with. Sex was sex, a physical appetite satisfied by a physical act. Emotions didn’t come into it and he had never seen why they should. He still didn’t. And he still had no idea what had made him confront her like that, or what had driven such an out-of-character fury at the thought of her with another man, even though she had had yet to become his. It had caught him totally off guard when he had seen the sudden shimmer of suppressed tears in her eyes. At first he’d wanted to believe they were caused by her grief at the breakdown of her marriage, but to his shock, she had told him quietly:
‘Our marriage…our relationship, in fact, was never physically consummated.’
Marco remembered how he had struggled not to show his astonishment, perhaps for the first time in his life recognising that what he had needed to show wasn’t the arrogant disbelief so often evinced by his grandfather, but instead restraint and patience, to give her time to explain. Which was exactly what she had done, once she had silently checked that he wasn’t going to refuse to believe her.
‘I was too naïve to realise at first that Victor making no attempt to approach me sexually might not be a. because of gentlemanly consideration for my inexperience,’ she continued. ‘And then even after we were married—I didn’t want him, you see, so it was easy for me not to question why he didn’t want to make love to me. If I hadn’t lived such a sheltered life, and I’d spent more time with people my own age, things would probably have been different, and I’d certainly have been more aware that something wasn’t right. But as it was, it wasn’t until I…I found him in bed with someone else that I realised—’
‘He had a mistress,’ Marco interrupted her, his normal instinct to question and probe reasserting itself.
There was just the merest pause before she told him quietly, ‘He had a lover, yes. A male lover,’ she emphasised shakily.
‘I should have guessed, of course, and I suspect poor Victor thought that I had. He treated me very much as a junior partner in our relationship, like a child whom he expected to revere him and accept his superiority. For me to find him in bed with one of his young students was a terrible blow to his pride. He couldn’t forgive me for blundering in on them, and the only way I could forgive myself for being so foolish was to insist that we divorce. At first he was reluctant to agree. He belonged more to my grandfather’s generation than to his own, I suspect. He couldn’t come to terms with his sexuality, which was why he had tried to conceal it within a fake marriage. He refused to say why he couldn’t be open about his sexual nature. He got very angry when I tried to talk to him about it and suggested that, for his own sake, he should accept himself. The truth was, as I quickly learned, that to others his sexuality was not the secret he liked to think. There was no valid reason why