The Unmarried Husband Read online

  ‘No. We aren’t.’

  His admission was enough to take the wind out of her sails. She had overreacted. So he had made his hurtful observations, but there had been nothing malicious behind them. She had responded with a cheap desire to retaliate, whatever the cost. ‘I think it’s probably best for me to leave now.’ He stood up, a huge, commanding figure, dwarfing the little kitchen, and Jessica sprang to her feet almost simultaneously. ‘There’s no need... I’m awfully sorry...’

  ‘Whatever for?’ There was no warmth in his voice, and he began heading out of the kitchen.

  It occurred to her that this would probably be the last time that she would ever lay eyes on him, and, infuriating though he had proved, the prospect of that was like being punched in the stomach.

  Of course, it was because he would walk away with completely the wrong impression of her. He would leave thinking that she was a willful, stubborn, unpleasant, pig-headed fool. ‘I’m sorry about mentioning your relationship with your son.’ She reached out and touched his arm very gently, and he stopped. Immediately Jessica let her hand drop to her side. She could feel her fingers tingling where they had come into contact with his jacket. ‘It was rude and uncalled for,’ she said bravely.

  He smiled slowly. ‘In that case, I won’t give you detention,’ he said in his low, deep, utterly mesmerising voice. ‘But I really still have to get home. For a start I don’t think that Mark took a key with him. Someone might hear him yelling at a locked front door and call the police.’

  He headed towards the door and Jessica followed in his wake. So, will I be seeing you again? she stupidly wanted to ask. ‘Well,’ she said instead, opening the front door and standing back, ‘I hope Mark does well in his exams and gets into university.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you said that.’

  ‘Oh, no, then he might think that we carried on chatting after they left!’

  ‘True! What a horrifying thought!’ Then another glimpse of one of those rare, amused, captivating smiles, and he was gone. The space he left seemed disproportionately large. Jessica busied herself in the kitchen, tidying away the mugs, surprised when Lucy returned home in high spirits and well before the witching hour.

  So! He’d been right about that, at any rate. Letting her go to the wretched nightclub had circumvented at least an hour’s worth of bickering and had done wonders for her daughter’s spirits.

  What else had he been right about?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘MARK seems a very nice boy.’

  Jessica knew that any such observation had to be made with precision timing. Too soon after the prearranged dinner would have been instantly put down to maternal nosiness, too long after and, knowing Lucy, she would have completely forgotten the episode.

  Jessica gave it a couple of days, and, when nothing was forthcoming, she decided to mention the dinner, but casually, at the weekend, sitting in front of the television while Lucy sat next to her on the sofa and divided her time between scathing comments on the documentary they were watching, glancing at a school test, and yawning dramatically.

  ‘I hate that description ‘nice’,’ Lucy said absent-mindedly. ‘It’s the sort of word people use to describe cream cakes.’

  ‘Interesting, then.’

  ‘More interesting than those childish idiots in my class at school, at any rate.’

  ‘Where did you meet him’? You never said.’

  ‘Tennis match.’

  ‘Tennis match’?’ Jessica had never heard mention of any tennis match. As far as she was aware Lucy dabbled occasionally with a tennis racquet, but there was no way that she was up to competitive tennis. Not unless she had secretly been taking lessons, which was unlikely since most forms of sport tended to provoke scathing criticism.

  ‘School arranged it.’ She yawned widely, looked at her mother and grinned. ‘Pretty funny, too. All the people from Mark’s school turned up wearing the regulation starched white outfits. All of us turned up in whatever we could manage to grab from the wardrobe before we left home. Mrs Talbot was furious!’ Lucy beamed a little wider at the memory of that. ‘She said that we were an insult to the school.’

  ‘Oh, Lucy!’ Jessica sighed, and decided that she really should say something at this point. ‘You should have told me. We could have gone out and bought you a little white skirt.’

  ‘No way! I would have stuck out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘Anyway, splashing out on a little white tennis outfit that I’d have worn once would have been a waste of money, and you keep saying that we’re poor.’

  ‘I do not keep saying that, Luce, and we don’t have to count pennies quite so vigorously.’ But she could see Lucy’s point. She had made a habit of being careful. There had been no choice. No spending sprees, a cheap and cheerful fortnight’s holiday once a year—usually to Cornwall—clothes that were utilitarian for herself rather than decorative. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Since this seemed to be straying from the topic, Jessica said, on a placatory note, ‘So, who won the tennis match’?’

  ‘They did! Most of us could hardly play, though we put up a good fight.’

  ‘And you played against Mark?’

  ‘Why so interested?’

  ‘It’s just...’ she refrained from using the word ‘nice’ ‘...helpful for me to know who your friends are.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, I’m glad I met him. As I said, he seems a very down to earth kind of boy.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Mum—he’s not a boy. He’s seventeen!’

  ‘Sorry—young man. The sort of boy that any girl would be proud to bring home to show her mother.’ Jessica didn’t think that she had heard herself make such an infuriatingly fuddy-duddy remark in her life before. She very nearly groaned out loud. This was what it did to you, she thought—having a child at the age of seventeen, with no support systems to fall back on, catapulted you straight out of childhood into adulthood without the benefit of any build up in between.

  And, in a way, it had been worse for her because she had spent the past sixteen-odd years locked in her self-imposed ivory tower. Oh, she had her friends, and they were great fun, but the companionship of a man, the warmth of someone else’s laughter in bed at night, had been missing from her life. She had voluntarily given it all up because she had been afraid of being hurt again, afraid of trusting, once she had discovered that trust could be broken, and in the most cavalier of ways. Eric Dean had done that to her; that had been his final parting gift.

  She felt a sudden, shocking flare of bitterness and resentment. How could he have betrayed her trust so completely? He had created a plausible persona for himself, and it had all been a charade to get her into bed. As it had turned out, it had been a matter of force on his part and fear on hers. Even thinking about it now made her feel sick.

  But still—until now—she had happily justified her seclusion, happily viewed other people’s complex love lives with a certain amount of relief—relief that she was not part of any of it. Recently, though... Well, had she been wrong? Lucy was talking, telling her that she was becoming a one-woman dictatorship. ‘Anyway,’ she said without guile, ‘Mark and I aren’t going out. We see one another, sure, but we’re not involved in that way.’

  ‘You’re not?’ Jessica forgot her brief surge of introspection. This was the first time that Lucy had mentioned anything to do with her love life, or absence of one. ‘Not, of course, that I don’t expect you to have a love life ...a boyfriend... whatever...’ Who am I kidding? she thought. Deep down, I don’t expect her to have any love life, least of all a sex life, until she’s well into her twenties and knows what she’s going to do with the rest of her life.

  Lucy didn’t reply, but she was staring hard at the television screen, eyes averted, cheeks pink.

  ‘Just as long as you take the necessary precautions...’ How was it that this subject had never been broached before? A couple of years ago, she had explained about the birds and the bees and that
had been easy. A technical chat about babies and where they came from, all fairly pointless, as it turned out, since Lucy knew more on the subject from a purely biological point of view than Jessica did.

  But this—mentioning contraception, discussing sex and the possibility of it—it made her feel helpless and lost. ‘Oh, Mum, p...l...ease...’

  ‘Well, darling...’

  ‘Don’t worry! I’m not about to hop into bed with Mark Newman! If anything, you should be grateful that I know him at all—he’s the only one who’s trying to persuade me to go on to sixth form. Apart from you, that is, and those dreary teachers at school. If they’re any kind of example of what’ll become of me if I stay on at school, then I’d rather look for work at a supermarket.’

  ‘You don’t mean that, Lucy.’ And she didn’t. It was all a show of bravado. At the last parents’ evening, she had got glowing reports from all her teachers who had been full of praise. Still, it was disturbing, this recurring theme of Lucy’s—the threat that she would leave school and do some kind of course. There was, after all, no smoke without a fire.

  ‘Why not? You did, and I know you complain that you could have done more, but you have a pretty good job. There are graduates all over the country who are out of work, who’d kill to do what you’re doing.’

  ‘And there are graduates all over the country who are climbing steadily upwards,’ Jessica said quickly, but any signs of interest in the conversation from Lucy were fast vanishing. The documentary had finished. A hospital drama had started—much more gripping to judge from the expression on her daughter’s face. She had always been fascinated with blood, operations and the mystique of medicine.

  ‘Shh, Mum...l want to watch this...’

  ‘Have you finished your homework?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘Lucy...!’

  ‘It’s only maths—I can do it with my eyes closed.’ Which was true enough. As far as maths and sciences went, she absorbed knowledge like a sponge, and could store an amazing array of technical information.

  Jessica sighed and stared vacantly at the television screen, but her thoughts were a thousand miles away.

  Kath would not be going on to do her A levels. Nor would Robin.

  Their parents had not expected them to, and weren’t in the least disappointed. These girls were Lucy’s closest friends, and peer pressure was a powerful thing.

  Mark Newman and his tenuous encouragement of Lucy’s education now seemed positively advantageous. She wished that she had been thinking on her feet at the time, had perhaps suggested that he pop over for dinner, made a definite date, even though it was doubtful that Lucy would have appreciated the gesture.

  If only his father had been a little warmer, a little more humanlike and a little less downright forbidding, she might have been tempted to give him a call, but she dismissed the thought even before it had begun to take root.

  His impact on her had not diminished since she had last seen him on Thursday. If anything, it had become stronger. She could hardly venture into her own kitchen now without remembering how he’d dwarfed it with his lean, towering body. She could remember his overpowering presence as vividly as she could recall the colour of his hair and the shade of his eyes. To say the least, it was irritating.

  It also seemed to dominate her life more than was appropriate. A brief interlude with a man who had been cornered into helping her had no right to become anything more than a passing memory with time.

  It hardly helped matters either that, having met Mark Newman and ascertained that he was just the sort of influence that Lucy needed, his name seemed to have been abruptly dropped from Lucy’s conversation.

  That, she supposed, had always been the danger. Had legitimising him somehow removed the glamour for Lucy? Turned him into someone boring who wore jackets occasionally and could converse in adult company? With her mother, of all people?

  It was a pleasant relief when, three weeks later, Adam Chauncy, her boss, asked her out to lunch. It was during Secretary Week. This was one of those inventions masterminded years back to maintain a happy working environment. For one week during the year, the secretaries were all taken out by their bosses for lunch to a restaurant of their choosing, as a gesture of thanks for hard work. It had begun when the firm had been younger and smaller. They had gone out as a group then, but now, with several expansions under its belt, the group idea was no longer feasible and the week had somehow grown into a fortnight, so that the bosses could make time to take the senior secretaries out on a one-to-one basis.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ Adam asked her, on the Monday.

  ‘Money no object?’ Jessica teased. Adam was fifty-two years old and a dear.

  ‘I absolutely put my foot down at a plane trip to Paris for the day.’

  ‘Well, that limits my options, in that case.’ Jessica laughed and then said suddenly, ‘I know a nice spot, though. Not in the West End. A little French restaurant—super atmosphere.’ She had been impressed with the food, with the service, with the decor, and when else would she get the chance to pay a second visit? No point telling herself that she would splash out and treat herself and Lucy to another meal there. She knew that when the time came she would chicken out at the thought of the whopping bill at the end of it.

  So later in the week she found herself again dressing for Chez Jacques, albeit with no nervous fluttering in the pit of her stomach this time.

  The weather had become hotter over the past few weeks. Very soon the authorities would announce a hose-pipe ban, something that Jessica found amusing whenever she glanced into her back garden. It was so compact that a hose would probably convert it into a swimming pool. It was warm enough, though, for her to wear her pale green sleeveless shift, without the regulatory jacket which seemed to be part of her working wardrobe, whatever the weather. Sitting out in the garden at the weekends had put a tawny glow on her cheeks, and her blonde hair was streaked into natural highlights. She didn’t look mumsy, she decided, staring at her reflection in the mirror and daring it to challenge the observation. She might feel it most of the time, but right now she felt young and attractive.

  She perversely thought of Anthony Newman and wished that he could see her now. Glowing from the sun rather than hassled with worries about Lucy.

  So it was with shock, halfway through the meal, as she was listening to Adam hold forth on two of his cases which were proving more laborious than he had initially anticipated, that she glanced up and saw none other than Anthony Newman being shown to a table.

  He was not dressed for work. His clothes were casual, well-tailored and clearly expensive. His moss-green polo shirt bore an emblem on one side, and she would bet a year’s salary that it wasn’t a department store logo.

  Adam’s conversation suddenly lost all interest value. She continued to nod, murmur and shake her head in the right places, but she knew that she had slunk down a little lower in her chair, and was eagerly and compulsively absorbing the sight of Anthony Newman at the table. He was obviously waiting for someone.

  Natural curiosity, she told herself. Human nature at work. Having idly reflected earlier that morning that she wouldn’t have minded him seeing her relaxed, tanned and without a teenager in tow, she now realised that the last person she wanted to lay eyes on was him.

  Fortunately, with a little repositioning of herself, Adam successfully blocked most of her from view. It helped as well that the restaurant was full—not that he was paying the slightest bit of notice to anything around him. He had brought a document folder with him, and had proceeded to extract a slim wad of papers which he was now perusing, frowning and making notes. Ever at work, she thought. She dragged her attention away from him long enough to make a few intelligent responses to what Adam was saying, and then found her eyes drifting back towards the casually impressive figure at the table. Of course, she should really make her presence known. Politeness dictated it, if nothing else, but she knew that she had no intention of doing any such thin
g. Firstly because the thought of his eyes on her, assessing, made her squirm with discomfort. And, secondly, because she instinctively reacted against giving the wrong impression—what if he thought that she was being pushy? She realised with a little dismay that she had lost the art of relating to men. She was fine in a work environment, or in a group, but on a one-to- one basis she had grown rusty over time. For experience, she could only substitute her imagination, and her imagination told her that a man like Anthony Newman would probably be a little aghast at being approached by a woman whose presence had originally been forced onto him, and whom he had probably quite forgotten. It would be mortifying.

  She reverted her attention to Adam, making sure that she smiled a lot, responded a lot, and acted in a normal manner. But, even with eyes heavily averted, she still managed to see the woman who was eventually shown to Anthony’s table. How could she fail to notice her? Nearly everyone else in the

  restaurant did. There was the discreet turning of heads as they watched the easy, confident stride of the six-foot blonde. Short hair, short skirt, long, long legs. A figure built for a catwalk. She had wondered what sort of women Anthony Newman was attracted to. Now she knew. Elegant, refined, beautiful and young. This particular model couldn’t have been older than her early twenties.

  ‘You’re much better looking, my dear,’ Adam said, patting her hand, and Jessica blushed madly. ‘Adam Chauncy, I was not...’

  ‘Course you were! My wife does it all the time. She says that it’s a healthy female reaction to check the competition.’ Jessica laughed. ‘Your wife hasn’t got any competition.’