Authors: Penny Jordan
Cruel Legacy (27 page)
VlWULi ■ -* - A.
eyes. But then of course you would lie, wouldn't you, just as you're lying about your reason for being here... just as you're lying about not being able to go to university... ?'
'I'm not lying,' Philippa protested.
'Yes, you are,' Blake insisted. 'There's only one person stopping you from going to university,' he told her harshly, 'and it isn't your father. It's you. You want it all, Philippa, don't you? You aren't prepared to make any effort,
any
sacrifice... no, others can do that for you while you sit there prettily and accept it as your due.
'Well, shall I tell you something about that prettiness, Philippa—shall I? In reality it isn't prettiness at all, it's ugliness... ugliness, because without intelligence, without character, all it is is just a vapid, empty mask. That's all you are, Philippa.. .just an empty, pretty mask, not a real woman at all. Yes, you're pretty, Philippa, as pretty and prettily packaged as a little doll and just as insipid and lifeless.' And Blake poured out more painful words in the same vein.
He released her then, pushing her away from him with such force that she almost fell.
The hall door was still open and, reacting instinctively, driven by her desire to escape both from him and from his humiliation of her, she took to her heels and fled.
He ran after her, following her right out to the car, and she thought he might actually open the door and drag her out of it, but to her relief there was a policeman walking down the road towards them and, taking advantage of his presence, she turned the key in the ignition and drove off.
The pain of Blake's rejection of her, of knowing how he felt about her, was so intense that there were times in the following weeks, many, many of them, when she didn't know how she was going to bear it. Only her pride kept her going. Her pride was, after all, all she had left.
She couldn't believe how she had ever been stupid enough to imagine that Blake had wanted her, that he might share her feelings, and whenever she thought of what she had done she writhed inwardly in such self-inflicted torment that
she felt as though she was being burned in the fire of her own self-loathing and contempt.
She hated herself so much that she had no energy left for anything else, and certainly not enough to fight with her parents.
| Six weeks later, when she met Andrew, she told herself · that he was the balm she needed to soothe and heal her wounds, that in view of everything Blake had said about her she was, as her parents were saying, lucky that Andrew so obviously wanted her. , It was easy then to deceive herself that she was doing the j right thing; after all, she had deceived herself before, hadn't she? Easier simply to give in to the pressure her parents were putting on her.. .easier simply to pretend to herself that she had never really loved Blake at all. But the fear he had instilled in her remained, the fear and the self-doubt ...
What if he was right... what if in reality there was nothing there behind her prettiness?
He
wasn't
right, she told herself fiercely now, and she was going to prove it. Wasn't she?
Joel hadn't seemed to find her too vacuous to confide in. He hadn't been contemptuous of her looks.
He was a married man, she reminded herself, someone she barely knew, someone with problems enough of his own; but despite those problems there had been concern for her in his eyes, warmth in the way he'd talked to her... touched her.
They were poles apart in almost every way and yet, listening to him, talking to him, she had felt somehow closer to him than any other man she knew.
Closer to him and drawn to him. As a fellow victim of Andrew's actions, or as a man?
The phone rang, releasing her from the necessity of finding an answer.
It was the boys' headmaster, and she still hadn't spoken to her parents. Coward, she derided herself as she acknowledged that she would have to apologise to him and ask him for a little more time, but before she could say anything
she heard him telling her, 'I think I've solved the problem of the boys' trip. The school has a special fund for cases like theirs. I've checked with the administrator and he confirms that they are eligible, so unless you particularly want them home for Easter, which I wouldn't recommend at the moment, they can go on the trip to Italy as originally planned. By summer, when they've had more time to adjust to their father's death, things should be different.'
'At least something seems to be going my way,' she told Susie later when her friend rang.
'Mmm, looks as if you've hit bottom and are on the way up,' Susie suggested optimistically.
'Right now I'd quite happily settle for on the bottom,' Philippa told her.
But, even though she discussed quite openly with her friend the trauma of her visit to the social services office, she did not mention meeting Joel.
Why should she? she asked herself quickly as she replaced the telephone receiver. After all, it was not as though he had any real relevance to her life, or she to his, was it...?
Joel
tensed as he heard Sally open the kitchen door; his ears and his mind, now attuned to her routine, caught the sound of her exasperated indrawn breath.
'Joel, where are you?'
She came into the living-room and demanded, 'Haven't you got anything better to do than watch television all day?'
'Like what?' he asked bitterly.
'Like finding a job.'
The minute the words were out Sally regretted them, but it was too late, they were said. She watched Joel's face close up and his mouth grow bitter.
'What job?' he demanded. 'There are no jobs, Sally.'
She knew that; after all, she had had to listen to him saying it often enough over the last few weeks.
Guiltily she tried to smother her frustration. It wasn't Joel's fault that he was out of work, after all, even if Daphne seemed to think differently.
Thinking about her sister reminded her of something else she had said.
'No jobs, maybe,' she retorted now. 'But there is work. Daphne was saying only the other day that she knows dozens of people looking for someone to do a bit of gardening or decorating and she's right, Joel. Sister was saying only last week that she's been trying to find someone to paint the outside of her house. Surely you could...'
Joel couldn't listen to any more.
'I could what?' he exploded. 'Go cap in hand to the likes of your sister and her posh friends begging for work?' Angry colour flared across his cheekbones. 'She'd love that, wouldn't she? She'd...'
Sally pushed her hand wearily into her hair. She had just come from a ward where a patient whose life they had been fighting for for over a week had just died; she was mentally and physically exhausted with the strain of working full-time and trying to run things at home as well. 'Well, at least it would be work, and there'd be some extra money coming in,' she told him bitterly.
Did he have any idea what a struggle it was for her to manage? She knew how upset and worried he was about losing his job and she'd done her best to cope and not to add to his worries by admitting that her money just wasn't going as far as she'd hoped, but he knew how much she earned compared with what they'd been bringing home; surely he could see for himself how much she was struggling?
She frowned as her attention was caught by the magazines on the floor beside his chair: two angling ones and one of them was an expensive one, she recognised as the tension and anxiety inside her suddenly exploded in a ball of tight, frightened anger.
'Joel, how could you?' she demanded as she picked them up. 'How could you waste money on these when you know...?' Her voice shook as she threw them down on the floor. 'If you think I'm going out to work, half killing myself, so that you can waste money on stuff like this...'
Joel's face went white. 'They cost three pounds eighty, less than you give the kids for spending money,' he told her with quiet venom.
His words struck at her conscience like physical blows, but Sally was too angry to back down.
'They
earn
that money,' she told him sharply.
When Joel came towards her, for one awful heartbeat of time she actually thought he was going to hit her—Joel, who was the least violent human being she knew. Instinctively she shrank back from him, her eyes widening with fear and shock.
Joel looked shocked too. Shocked and something else, something she couldn't put a name to but which brought a lump of painful aching emotion to her throat as her senses suddenly relayed to her what her eyes had refused to see: the way his shoulders were hunched, the brooding, bitter, defeated look in his eyes.
She wanted to run up to him and fling her arms round him, to tell him that she was sorry.. .to explain that she was tired and confused and very, very frightened; that she hadn't realised just what it would mean to have the full financial responsibility of their lives resting on her shoulders; that she ached sometimes for him to take hold of her and tell her that she wasn't to worry, that he would sort everything out, even though she knew that wasn't possible.
She felt so alone, so afraid, but Joel just didn't seem to notice or care.
Other people did, though. Daphne had commented the last time she had seen her on how tired she looked.
'You'd think Joel would find some way of earning something,' Daphne had told her. 'After all, it's not as though he couldn't... not with his upbringing.'
Sally had had to avoid looking at her. It would be a betrayal of Joel to tell her sister how he felt about the life he had led as a child, about the fact that his father had never had a regular job and had had to scrape a living where he could.
Joel had once told her that without the allotment he'd worked on with his father they would often have gone without proper food.
'Jack of all trades, master of none, that was him,' Joel had told her bitterly. 'People used to treat him like dirt: he should never have married my mother... He ruined her life as well as his own... and ours...'
Sally had winced as she'd listened to him. As a girl she had thought his background, his gypsy blood romantic, but Joel had shown her a different side of that inheritance when he'd revealed to her the taunts he had suffered as a child, the determination he had developed never, ever to be like his father.
And yet Sally had liked the older man. He had been very like Joel. He had been kind and gentle, patient, and Sally knew how much it had hurt him that Joel had rejected him.
'There aren't the jobs,' she had said quietly, deliberately misunderstanding her sister as she'd added, 'Not for someone with Joel's training...'
Daphne had given an exasperated sigh. 'You're too soft" on him,' she had told her, 'And you're letting him take advantage of you. You should be careful, Sally... after all, what's in the blood...'
'What do you mean?' Sally had demanded unwisely.
'Well, it's a well-known fact that gypsy men live off what their women earn,' Daphne had responded self-righteously.
'Oh, Daphne,' Sally had protested. 'That's not fair-Joel's not that sort of man. He would never...' She had stopped, unable to go on.
It wasn't the money he had spent on the magazines, she wanted to tell Joel, not really, but the words were stuck in her throat, the anger she felt refusing to subside. He was walking towards the kitchen... and away from her, ignoring her.
He paused in the doorway and turned round.
'I didn't buy those magazines, Sally, I was given them,' he told her bleakly. His pride wouldn't let him tell her that he didn't have the money in his pocket to buy them.
She never seemed to think, when she was doling out money to the kids and banging on about not wanting them to suffer because he was out of a job and it being important to them not to lose face in front of their friends, that he might feel the same. How did she think it made him feel, having to refuse to go out with his friends because he didn't have any money in his pocket—or any chance of earning any, from what he had learned at the Job Centre this morning?
Sally swallowed guiltily.
'Did you go down to the Job Centre today?' she asked him, avoiding looking at him.
'Yes, and there wasn't any thing... not that I thought there would be.'
'Oh, Joel, please stop feeling so sorry for yourself. You
could
find work if you wanted to... I've just told you, Daphne wants some decorating doing. We need the money,'
she told him exasperatedly. 'The tyres on my car are practically bald... I daren't keep on driving with them. We're so lucky that I've got my job...'
'Are we?' Joel turned on her. 'I don't feel so damn lucky having a wife who can't stop ramming it down my throat that she's the breadwinner and I'm just another useless mouth to feed.. .not like the kids. You don't begrudge what you spend on them, do you? What is it you really think, Sally? That you'd be better off without me.. .that you don't really want me around any more?'