Cruel Legacy (30 page)

Sally tensed as she heard the phone ring. Joel got up to answer it and her stomach muscles locked. It was silly to feel like this, she scolded herself. After all, what really had she done wrong? What if Kenneth did ring her? He was an ex-patient who...

Who had what? Kissed her and made her see all the things that were missing from her life?

'It's your sister,' Joel told her abruptly, coming into the kitchen.

The relief that flooded her was dangerously entangled with disappointment as well.

The postman had arrived as she picked up the receiver and her heart sank as she saw the bills in among the circulars.

'Have you spoken to Joel about when he can do my decorating yet?' Daphne wanted to know. 'Only I'd like him to come and make a start on it as soon as possible, Sally. We've got a dinner party next month. It shouldn't take him long, after all, should it? I mean, it's not as though he's got anything else to do...'

Sally sighed under her breath. 'I'll have a word with him about it now,' she promised her sister.

'What did she want?' Joel demanded when Sally walked back into the kitchen.

Sally sighed again. Joel and her sister had never really hit it off and she knew that Daphne could be something of a snob at times, but was it really too much to ask of Joel that he didn't react aggressively to everything Daphne said or did? Couldn't he see how difficult it made things for her?

Sally looked tired, Joel recognised as he looked at her. She had lost weight as well. He started to frown.

As she walked towards the sink she bumped into the corner of the table, stumbling slightly.

Joel reacted instinctively, reaching out to steady her, putting his hand on the hip she had bumped and rubbing it with his fingers.

She smelled of soap and shampoo, the slightness of her body against his reminding him of how protective towards her he had always felt, of how vulnerable she sometimes seemed. It was one of the most basic and deep-rooted aspects of his character, this need he had to protect and secure those weaker than himself, and now suddenly he had an urge to wrap his arms around her, to hold her and tell her how ashamed he felt. He wanted, he acknowledged, not just to hold her, but to be held in turn; to be told that she understood, that she...

'Joel, no...'

The sharp protest in her voice as she pulled away from him felt like a knife slicing into the vulnerable flesh of his emotions, the irritation and rejection he could both hear and see freezing back the words he had wanted to say.

'Can't you think about anything but that?' Sally demanded bitterly.

'Such as?' Joel challenged her.

'Such as these.' Angrily she threw the bills down on the table.

She hadn't received this month's salary yet and already it was almost accounted for. Paul had come in last night saying he would need new football boots and now here were those bills. She felt sick at the thought of opening them, knowing already that she might not be able to pay them, and all Joel could do was grab hold of her and...

Silently Joel watched her. The unopened bills lay between them on the table. Sally reached for one of them, ripping it open, scanning it feverishly. Perhaps with the money her sister paid Joel for the decorating they might just be able to cover it.

She reached for the other but Joel stopped her.

'That's addressed to me,' he told her flatly.

Sally stared at him. Joel had never minded who opened their post, and invariably she was the one to do so because he was at work when it arrived.

Suddenly she just couldn't take any more.

'You open it, then,' she told him angrily. 'And you pay it as well...'

Bitterly Joel watched as she stormed out of the room. He could still vaguely feel the imprint of her hipbone against his fingertips. Once she would never have confused a gesture meant to comfort and solace with one that was sensual and questioning... Once... once a lot of things had been different...

He picked up the unopened bill and opened it.

'You pay it', she had challenged him. He could feel the painful burn of his emotions searing his eyelids.

Once she got upstairs Sally discovered that she was shaking with reaction to their row.

She shouldn't have spoken to Joel like that, she knew, but couldn't he see the strain she was under? Other people could... Like her sister... like Kenneth.

She sighed and got up. In less than an hour she had to be at work, and before that she had to persuade Joel to do her sister's decorating.

Philippa saw Joel walking up the drive from an upstairs window.

'The car's still in the garage... It's round here,' she told him awkwardly as she went outside to meet him. The wind was ruffling his hair, thick and dark and silky. She had an odd urge to reach out and touch it. To touch him...

Uncomfortably she distanced herself from him, hurrying ahead of him as she led the way round the side of the house. What was happening to her? She just didn't feel like this about men... react to them like this.

She looked over her shoulder, suddenly anxious to tell Joel that she had changed her mind. She didn't want him here. It was too...

He was standing looking at the ground she had been clearing.

'I'm working on my vegetable garden,' she heard herself telling him uncertainly. 'I thought...'

Joel bent down and picked up a handful of soil, letting it trickle through his fingers.

'Good soil,' he told her, 'but you'll have to watch that hedge; cut it down a bit otherwise it will take too much light...'

'You obviously know a lot more about it than I do. Are you a keen gardener?'

'No,' Joel told her abruptly and then, realising how curt he had sounded, he added, 'My father had an allotment— it was one of my chores as a boy to work on it...'

There was an expression on his face that told Philippa that his memories of that work weren't good ones.

'That must have been hard work?' she sympathised.

'Hard and dirty,' Joel told her. 'I used to have to scrub my hands with bleach to get them clean, otherwise...'

He shook his head. He had already said more than he wanted to. Not even Sally knew about all of the humiliation he had suffered in his early years at school when one of the teachers had objected to his touching the school books with his dirt-grimed hands. It had, after all, been before he knew her, a painful memory which he had fiercely suppressed because of the shame it had caused him—and yet for a second he almost revealed it to this woman who was not just a stranger to him but who had, he suspected, no idea what it meant to live in the kind of semi-poverty, the uncertainty which he had known as a child.

'The garage is this way,' Philippa told him.

The garage was large enough to house three cars, and hers looked small and forlorn alone in it. The dealer had repossessed Andrew's within days of his death. It had not, apparently, been paid for. Fortunately, hers had.

As Joel went to switch on the light, Philippa flushed guiltily, remembering that the bulb had gone and that she hadn't replaced it.

'It's OK, I'll do it,' Joel told her.

'I
can
change a light bulb,' Philippa told him, adding wryly, 'Just about! I think I'm going to have to find a night-school course of basic house maintenance. It's ridiculous in this day and age not to be able to change a fuse or wire a plug...'

Joel could hear the frustration in her voice.

'It's not that difficult,' he told her quietly. 'I could teach you easily enough.'

For no reason that she could account for, Philippa could feel her skin starting to heat.

'I'd... I'd better go and let you get on...' she told him huskily. 'I—er—would you like a cup of coffee?'

Philippa deliberately didn't linger when she took Joel his coffee. His head was bent over the open bonnet of her car. He had removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. His forearms were much broader than Andrew's had been, much more muscular, his skin faintly tanned beneath its covering of dark hair.

A tiny
frisson
of sensation went through her. Guiltily she looked away.

What was wrong with her? She was behaving like some textbook sex-starved widow. Which, given the true state of her married sex life, was absolutely ridiculous.

She was in the kitchen half an hour later when Joel knocked on the door and walked in.

'I think it will be OK now,' he told her. 'The plugs needed a bit of a clean. It probably needs a good run as well...'

Philippa grimaced slightly. Giving it a good run meant filling the tank with petrol...something she couldn't afford. The electricity bill had come this morning. She saw Joel glancing at it.

'Ours came too,' he told her. 'According to Sally it's higher than usual—my fault, of course. I'm sorry,' he apologised. 'It's just...' He stopped.

'It must be a worrying time for both of you,' Philippa sympathised. 'But at least you've got each other to share it with.'

Joel laughed harshly. 'You think so? Sharing isn't something we do much of these days...'

She had obviously touched a raw nerve, Philippa recognised.

'For a man to lose his job is very stressful in a relationship,' she said quietly. 'Sally... your wife is probably very worried about you; she...'

'Is she?' Joel demanded harshly. 'Well, you'd certainly never know it. All I get from her these days is, "Joel, do this, Joel, have you done that? Joel, don't touch me

He broke off, tensing as he looked at her. He had said more than he'd intended to say, Philippa recognised, and the old Philippa—the Philippa who preferred to turn aside rather than face up to things—would have pretended the comment had never been made; but she wasn't that Philippa any more, and so she looked back at him and said quietly, 'Lots of women do go off sex when they're under stress... and men as well.'

'What I want from Sally isn't just sex; what I want to share with her is called making love, and it involves a lot more than a handful of seconds of clinical physical thrusting inside her body. A hell of a lot more.'

Philippa couldn't help it—she could feel the hot colour running up under her skin, knew that her face was on fire with it.

'I'm sorry,' Joel apologised, raking his fingers through his hair. 'I shouldn't have said it. I didn't mean to embarrass you, it's just... Why do women always call it sex when they want to make you feel bad about it... when they want to make you feel guilty, as if we're some kind of emotionless animals? To listen to her now you'd never think there was a time when Sally...' He shook his head.

'But you've got enough problems of your own without having to listen to mine. He was your husband, after all.

'Look, is it OK if I wash my hands?' They were covered in oil, Philippa saw, and there was also a smear of it across his cheekbone.

'Yes, I'm sorry... You can use Andrew's bathroom,' she told him as she opened the kitchen door and led the way across the hall. 'There's a shower in it, although I'm not sure how hot the water will be.'

'Andrew's bathroom?' he queried sharply.

Philippa flushed.

'Yes... it's... it's all right... I've removed all his personal things... and...'

'You had separate bathrooms?' Joel questioned, ignoring what she was saying.

'Yes... yes, we did,' Philippa told him uncomfortably. 'It was... it was easier that way. Andrew... he... he was a very private man... he...' She was floundering desperately for words, both angry and alarmed by what she was being forced to reveal.

Joel could sense her discomfort. What kind of relationship had she actually had with her husband? Not, he suspected, a very close one either emotionally or physically. He wondered if they had had separate beds as well as separate bathrooms and then cut himself off from the thought, sensing the danger that lurked behind it.

Philippa waited in the kitchen for him to come back downstairs. When he did his hair was still damp, his shirt clinging slightly to his skin. As he brought her the towels he had used she could smell the scent of soap on his skin and her stomach muscles knotted frantically against the sensation curling through her body.

'I... thank you for looking at my car for me,' she told him huskily as she looked away from him.

She looked so small standing there, with her blonde hair down and parting to show the soft curve of her neck. If he reached out now he could touch that soft skin with his fingertips. If he did, would she push him away as Sally did or would her body quiver in mute acknowledgement of the desire he could feel aching inside him; would she turn her head and look at him, silently acknowledging what was happening between them... accepting... inviting?

'I'm sorry you're having a difficult time at home,' Philippa told him shakily. 'I wish there were something I could do to help. I feel...'

I feel so guilty, she had been about to say, but Joel moved closer to her and suddenly her throat closed up, trapping the words.

'Just being here with you... talking to you helps,' Joel told her, and as he said it he recognised that it was true, that there was something about her that drew him to her, compelled him to confide in her in a way that was totally foreign to his nature.