Cruel Legacy (46 page)
Authors: Penny Jordan
'Don't send me away,' he begged her.
'Come into the kitchen,' Philippa told him, weakening, hoping that the more mundane workaday atmosphere there might ease the intensity of the sexual tension she could feel building between them. Here in the hallway with the stairs behind her and her mind and body already flooded with awareness of him, as well as the potency of her memories of their previous lovemaking, it would be all too tempting to turn round and take him by the hand, to give in to the need she knew they were both feeling.
'1 know what you're thinking,' Joel told her drily as she offered him a cup of tea. 'But I didn't come here looking for sex. No matter what Sally seems to think, that's not... Every time I try to touch her or hold her she accuses me of wanting sex, as though it's some kind of punishment
I'm inflicting on her.. .some kind of payment she has to make...
'She lies there next to me, her body tense and unmoving, willing me to get it over with. That's sex; that's what our relationship has been reduced to. What you and I shared...
'I'd forgotten how good it feels to hold a woman who's warm and responsive, who wants you as much as you want her, who doesn't turn her head away when you kiss her, or tense her body when you touch her.'
Philippa could feel her throat starting to ache as she listened to him. Did he realise how much he was betraying with every word he said? She could hear the anger in his voice when he spoke of his wife's lack of response to him, and she could hear the yearning and the pain as well.
Stupid, stupid and totally irrational of her to feel jealous of this unknown woman, and yet totally predictable that she should, as well.
Joel eventually shook his head. 'I'm sorry; you can't want to hear all this.'
She ought not to want to hear it, Philippa acknowledged, if only from a sense of self-preservation, but there was a morbid, self-destructive fascination in hearing about Joel's marriage, his relationship with his wife.
'All relationships suffer... change when there's a switch in their power base.' Philippa smiled as she saw the way Joel was watching her. 'I'm trying to be detached now,' she admitted wryly. 'To.. .to listen to you as a friend and not as...'
'A lover,' Joel supplied for her. 'I didn't plan what happened between us, Philippa, but it wasn't just a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that you were there and I wanted sex. If it were just sex I wanted, there are plenty...' He caught himself up. The last thing he wanted was for Philippa to think he was the kind of man who needed to brag about his sexuality, but there had been enough subtle and sometimes not so subtle come-ons from other women over the years for him to know that he could have quite easily found elsewhere the sexual satisfaction his marriage no longer gave him, if he had really wanted to.
That was what hurt, he acknowledged: the fact that Sally relentlessly accused him of being sexually obsessed when the reality was that for him sexual desire had to be accompanied by something deeper; and he had thought that Sally knew that.
'I suppose you think the same as Sally—that I'm a selfish, thoughtless bastard who '
'No,' Philippa interrupted him, shaking her head, 'it's just that as a woman...' She paused. Her marriage was not his, and to tell him that she too knew what it was like to lie intimately sexually entwined with a man with her body while her mind and emotions remained totally unengaged would be to open doors she preferred to keep closed. 'As a woman,' she continued, 'I know that it isn't always easy trying to combine so many different roles, especially when one of those roles involves being a mother...'
'I sometimes used to feel that our kids—especially Paul-meant far more to Sally than I did,' Joel admitted.
'Fathers often do feel a little bit jealous of their sons,' Philippa commented.
'Did
your
husband?'
She paused and then answered honestly, 'I don't know... Andrew and I never discussed our feelings. I was the one who wanted children; he... he never seemed to have any strong feelings for them one way or the other...' Or for me, she could have added, but she stopped herself, not wanting to sound self-pitying, and besides, wasn't at least half the truth that she and Andrew had never talked about their feelings because there hadn't been any real feelings between than to discuss—something she had always known and yet been afraid of confronting, preferring inertia to action, passive acceptance to passionate aggression?
'Sally and I used to talk a lot once... In bed at night after we'd... she used to lie there in my arms and tell me about her day... That all stopped once Paul was born. He was a difficult baby, restless at night, never wanting to go down, and she used to complain that if we made any noise we'd wake him up.
'Even when we made love all she seemed to want to do was to get it over with as quickly and quietly as possible.
'But at least then she still needed me...I could still support her... all of them... Now...'
'Can't you see, Joel?' Philippa told him gently. 'Her anger is because she's afraid... because she feels insecure... because she's worried about the way you're taking over her role...'
The baffled look he gave her made Philippa smile slightly.
'I'm just doing what she wants me to do...'
'Yes, but you're also usurping her role within the family, just as with her going out to work to support you all you feel she's usurping yours. It's like...it's like when someone does something for us that we're supposed to be grateful for... Logically we know we
should
be grateful, but inside a tiny part of us resents them for it, and knowing we feel that resentment makes us feel mean and uncomfortable with ourselves... None of us likes admitting to the darker side of our nature, even though we've all got one.
'I used to feel that my husband never gave our children enough time and attention, and yet I know that deep down inside me a part of me was secretly pleased that it was me they turned to and me they wanted, even though I knew that they needed love and attention from both of us.
'It's the same for all of us, whether we want to admit it or not; I suppose we're all programmed to feel protective and possessive about certain aspects of our most personal lives, about the things we do that give us status, if you like, in our own eyes. While we're quite happy to compete in a broader circle, when it comes to our most intimate relationships we each want and need to feel confident of supremacy in our own particular sphere.
'That's why it's so difficult for any of us to adapt to the kind of role reversal you and Sally are having to go through. Think about it, Joel. Deep down inside, aren't you perhaps just a little bit resentful of the fact that Sally is able to work and support you all, even though logically you know you should feel grateful for the fact that she can...?'
He was quiet for so long that Philippa thought she had gone too far, pressed on Mm too hard, but when he lifted his head and looked at her she expressed her pent-up breath in a small, leaky sigh of relief.
'Yes,' he admitted. 'Yes, I suppose I am...'
'And it's the same for Sally. She
knows
she needs your support at home and that she can't do everything but at the same time she feels hurt because she feels that you and the children no longer seem to need her.'
'She might be hurt because of the kids, but not because of me,' Joel denied.
'When a woman withdraws sexually from a man it doesn't necessarily mean that she's stopped loving him,' Philippa told him, but she saw from his expression that she hadn't sounded as positive as she would have liked and that he had picked up on her real feelings.
'Talk to her, Joel,' she urged him. 'Talk to her the way you've just talked to me...ask her why...what's wrong... Surely your marriage is worth that much of an effort...'
'And trying to work things out with Sally will stop me coming round here and pestering you... is that it?'
'No...no...' She could see the pain in his eyes. He deserved her honesty, Philippa recognised, both of them deserved it.
'It would be the easiest thing in the world to let what's started between us develop into... Until I met you I'd never thought of myself as a sexually hungry woman; far from it.
'I don't know whether to be ashamed of how much I want you or proud of it, but on balance feeling proud wins out. And I know myself well enough to guess that if a sexual relationship developed between us I'd become emotionally committed to you as well, emotionally dependent on you, and that wouldn't be healthy for either of us. Can't you see, Joel, that both of us, for different reasons, would be using what we have between us to cover up other problems, to avoid dealing with them...? We'd be using each other as a means of escape, and to me that would be the worst kind of betrayal—of ourselves and each other.
'It isn't that I don't care, but that I'm afraid of caring too much and for all the wrong reasons. What was it that first attracted you to your Sally, Joel...?'
He paused and then told her quietly, 'Her gentleness; the fact that she needed me... looked up to me, I suppose... it made me feel good... it made me feel...'
'Valued and wanted,' Philippa supplied for him. 'And now it's my need that your senses and emotions are responding to, but it's still Sally you love.'
'No,' Joel denied, but his voice lacked the conviction it had held earlier when he had told her that his marriage was over.
'It's time for you to go,' Philippa told him gently.
She walked with him to the front door and paused while he turned to her and took her in his arms.
'We would have been good together, you and I,' he told her huskily.
'Yes,' she agreed. Her throat achcd and her mouth trembled as he lowered his own to touch it, but she didn't try to turn away.
Tears burned behind her closed eyelids, her ears buzzing with the agonised cry of her silenced emotions. She neither moved nor touched him, making no attempt to hold on to him or keep him, but her lips clung betrayingly to his for a handful of seconds after their kiss ended, and she knew that if he pushed her now, if he begged her or pleaded, she wouldn't have the strength to resist him. She suspected he knew it too.
But he
didn't
say or do anything other than simply touch her mouth with his fingertips in a silent gesture of farewell before opening the door and walking away from her.
The phone started to ring as she walked back to the kitchen. She picked up the receiver, automatically forcing | herself to sound bright and optimistic, using the lessons learned over the weeks of her widowhood. 'Never mind love thy neighbour,' Susie had once told her grimly. 'It's love thyself that really matters.' Love herself, value herself, depend on herself, know herself—because her own self was
all that stood between her and the rest of the world now, Philippa admitted.
She recognised Elizabeth Humphries' voice before the other woman gave her name, her stomach tensing with familiar apprehension. Like her mind, her body had learned to dread the arrival of unheralded visitors and telephone calls, of letters and bills.
'The reason I'm ringing,' Elizabeth told her, 'is that the other evening at a dinner party I was talking with a colleague of my husband's who has just moved into the area and he was telling me about the problems he's having finding someone suitable to employ to take charge of both his orphaned god-daughter and his home.
'He stressed that he didn't want either a nanny or a traditional housekeeper but someone who could be to his goddaughter a sort of surrogate-mother figure, without usurping the role of the child's dead mother... He wants someone who can act on her own initiative and who is used to dealing with children; someone the child can relate to and whom he can trust not just to look after her physically, but to help her emotionally as well.
' It immediately occurred to me that you would be perfect for such a role.'
'Me? But I don't have any qualifications for that kind of thing,' Philippa protested. 'I'm not..
'You're a mother,' Elizabeth reminded her, and added drily, 'And reading between the lines, as well as going on my own judgement, I'd say you are more than adequately qualified for the role he's got in mind. He stressed to me that he considers it far more important that whoever he employs is more concerned about his god-daughter's emotional welfare than running a spotlessly clean house; that he wants someone young enough to be a mother figure to the girl and old enough to be left completely in charge of her.'
'You said she was orphaned...'
'Yes,' Elizabeth agreed.
Philippa hesitated. She could all too easily imagine the trauma such a child must be experiencing and the anxiety of the man apparently responsible for her.
'I... I don't know... A child like that would need someone who could make a long-term commitment to her. Has he— her godfather—has he no wife, no female relatives?'
'Apparently not. I'm not trying to push you into something you don't wish to do, and of course it will be the child's needs that come first; her godfather was quite adamant about that. He did say, however, that if you proved suitable he would be quite willing for you to have both your boys with you during the school holidays; in fact he seemed to think that would be a plus point—company for his goddaughter. He's got a large house with plenty of room to spare. The salary he mentioned is a good one; the girl is eleven and of course in full-time schooling so you would have some free time on your hands to study for that Open University course you discussed with me.'
'I... I don't know what to say,' Philippa admitted. 'It...it would solve a lot of my problems. I still haven't heard from the bank about the house, though...'
'Well, think about it,' Elizabeth counselled her. 'I've got his telephone number here if you want it; I left it with him that you'd telephone and make an appointment for an interview if you were interested. He knows something of your circumstances, by the way—not the full details, just the fact that you've recently been widowed and your financial situation; as a potential employer...'
'Yes, yes, of course... a housekeeper. I'd never thought...'
'Rather more than just a housekeeper,' Elizabeth corrected her firmly. 'I think you'll find he will place far more emphasis on how you will relate to his god-daughter than how well you can run a home, although I suspect that, like most men, he won't be averse to finding that his house is both well-run and comfortable; and, of course, his position at the hospital will mean that he could be involved in a certain amount of domestic entertaining, but that is something you would have to discuss with him if and when
you meet him. It would be quite a challenge,' Elizabeth remarked.
'Oh... does he have a very large house? I...'
'Not the house, the little girl. Apparently he had quite a battle with the Social Services to convince them that he was the best person to take charge of her. There was a great deal of talk of placing her with foster parents. Of course, they're bound to be jittery these days about the wisdom of placing any child, male or female, into sole male care, and I suspect he's very conscious of the need to provide her with the right kind of female companionship and care.
'I wouldn't have recommended you for the job if I hadn't genuinely thought you could do it,' Elizabeth told her quietly.
Eleven years old and orphaned, both her parents lost to her, poor child; Philippa could all too easily imagine the pain and fear she must be suffering.
She had always wanted another child, a girl... a daughter... She grimaced at her own sentimentality.
This child would
not
be her child, her daughter...they might not even get on... The godfather might not even like or want her.
'Do you want his number?' Elizabeth asked.
Philippa's mouth had gone dry.
'Yes. Yes, please,' she told her.
'What are you looking so pleased about?' Richard asked as he walked into the sitting-room and found his wife sitting in a chair with a very self-satisfied smile on her mouth.
'Nothing.. .well, if you must know. I was just congratulating myself on being a wonderful judge of character,' she told him, grinning at him.
'Such modesty... Why? What have you done?'
'You remember your new psychiatrist saying the other evening that he was looking for someone to take charge of his orphaned god-daughter...?'
'Vaguely,' Richard admitted.
'Well,
I'd thought of the perfect person, but,
as
I knew
she
would, she protested that she didn't think
she was
up
to the job, until I pointed out to her how much the little girl needed her.
'She's one of these women with too soft a heart for her own good. Securing her own financial future couldn't sway her judgement, but believing that another human being needed her could and did.'
'Didn't that used to be called emotional blackmail?' Richard asked her drily.
'Not by me,' Elizabeth assured him. 'I look upon it more as finding the right piece for the right place in a particularly complicated jigsaw...'
She laughed as she heard Richard murmuring under his breath, 'Egomaniac,' as he left the room.
She didn't normally indulge herself by playing
Deus ex machina
with other people's lives—her training had taught her the dangers of doing that—but in this instance...
'I've got an interview for a job... well, potentially at least,' Philippa announced after Susie had picked up the phone.
She had dialled her friend's number almost immediately she had finished speaking with Elizabeth, and now quickly she explained to her friend what had happened.
'It sounds perfect for you,' Susie told her enthusiastically. 'Ring him up now, and if you don't I'll come round and stand over you until you do.'
Happily Philippa started to dial the number Elizabeth had given her, a rush of nervous anticipation singing through her body.