PENNY JORDAN - To Love, Honour & Betray

‘Get out,’ Claudia demanded. ‘Just go, Garth. You may have come here to gloat, to—’

‘To what? Just what the hell do you think I am?’ Garth demanded. ‘Claudia, I didn’t—’

‘To remind me that you warned me that something like this might happen. How that must please you, Garth. How happy it must make you—’

‘Claudia. I didn’t come here to gloat. I came because I thought you might need someone to talk to … because I was concerned.’

‘Concerned.’ Claudia froze. ‘Concerned,’ she repeated, her voice metallic and sharp with disbelief. ‘Concerned for whom, Garth? Certainly not for me, the woman, the wife, you betrayed so easily. Did you talk about me when you were in bed with her? Did you discuss your concern for me with her? Ah, but I was forgetting. If you can’t remember making love to her, then you certainly won’t be able to remember discussing me, will you?’

‘Claudia, for God’s sake … I came here to talk to you about Tara, about her …’ Garth held his breath, waiting for her to retaliate, and when she didn’t, he started to release it very slowly.

‘But we are talking about her, aren’t we?’ she said softly now.

Across the silence that divided them, their eyes met and it was Garth’s that fell first.

‘Claudia,’ he began rawly, but she shook her head, the tempest of the emotions that had driven her so close to the edge of her self-control safely harnessed now, and she wasn’t going to allow Garth to provoke her into another demeaning outburst.

‘I’ve got to get ready to go out, Garth, I’m already running late,’ she told him crisply.

One look at her face told Garth that he would be wasting his time trying to talk to her, to reason with her. Shaking his head, he turned round and headed for the open doorway, cursing himself as he did so. He had handled things badly. Beneath her outwardly calm, gentle demeanour, Claudia had a very strong skein of the same stubborn pride and indomitable spirit that had made her father, the brigadier, the respected warrior that he was.

In Claudia, though, its inflexibility was normally tempered by her woman’s awareness that life came in varying shades of grey, rather than two opposing colours of black and white—apart from where he was concerned.

As he let himself out of the house and headed for his car, he reminded himself that there was that school of belief that said the greater the love, the greater the hatred following any form of betrayal, but his betrayal …

There were always two sides to every story and she hadn’t ever been prepared to listen while he told her his.

After the miscarriage of their first child, Claudia had become so depressed and withdrawn, so caught up in her own grief and sense of loss, that she had not realised that he was grieving, too, that he needed … wanted … As he started the engine, Garth shook his head. What was the point in thinking about that now? It was over. They were over; the only thing they had in common any more was their love for Tara.

Tara …

As the big car purred out of the drive, Garth realised that something was obscuring his vision. He switched on the windscreen wipers and then frowned, grimacing to himself, blinking fiercely. Men weren’t supposed to cry, were they? He could remember saying that to Claudia the night she had silently put Tara into his arms for the first time. She had been pathetically small, and he had ached with the overwhelming need to protect her and to keep her safe.

Tara. She was an adult now, not a child, and he could no longer guarantee to make the world, or life, safe and secure for her.

Claudia blinked as she focused vaguely on the flashing light on the telephone, her heart beating unsteadily. She felt … she felt … She was afraid, she acknowledged as she tried to analyse her feelings. How long had she been standing here staring into space? How long was it since Garth had gone?

She felt empty, hollow, disembodied and yet so heavy. So weighed down with the burden of her pain that her feet felt leaden, unable to move.

The telephone had stopped ringing. No doubt her caller would ring back. She was, she discovered, still wrapped only in the towel she had pulled on after her shower. She started to shiver. Beyond the bedroom window, the garden still basked in the warmth of the sun, but Claudia no longer saw it with the zest of a pioneer and adventurer bent on transforming it into her own private vision of paradise. In fact, it wasn’t the garden she saw at all.

She had always hated rows, arguments. They left her feeling sick, disorientated, weakened physically and emotionally, and the unexpectedness of this one with Garth had doubled its traumatic effect on her nervous system.

Like a sleepwalker, she started to get dressed, keeping her eyes focused on her dressing-table and its collection of silver-framed photographs, all of them of Tara—Tara as a baby, as a little girl, a teenager, a graduate. Her car keys lay on the dressing-table in front of one of the photographs, the one of Tara in her christening robe. Numbly, Claudia picked them up. She was dressed now, although she couldn’t have said what she had on … couldn’t have said and didn’t care.

Tara … The agonising ache inside her became a racking physical pain.

As she walked slowly downstairs, she could hear a sharp, anxious voice inside her head scolding her, telling her that there were things she had to do, people she had to see, but she ignored it, blotting it out.

There was something else she had to do, somewhere she had to be that was far more important.

The phone on his desk was ringing. Automatically, Lloyd reached out and picked it up.

‘Lloyd, Lloyd, when are you coming back to the island?’ His heart sank as he recognised Margot’s voice. He could tell from the sound of it that she was crying. Unwillingly, he pictured her.

She would be lying on her bed, her dark eyes burning with intensity, her thin frame curled protectively into a foetus-like ball.

Her body had developed a hard, angular edge to it and she had about her a hungry, voracious look. But as he of all people had good reason to know, her hunger wasn’t for food.

‘The summer is our time,’ she was protesting tearfully now. ‘My time with you. It’s the only time we have together. Oh, Lloyd, I can’t bear it here without you.’

The words made a sound like a long, tormented wail, assaulting his eardrums with their pain.

‘I had to come back, Margot, but I should be through here by the weekend.’

‘The weekend … That means we’ll have missed a full week together. Ring me tonight, won’t you? I’ll be … thinking of you.’

As he replaced the receiver, Lloyd stared unseeingly across his desk. He normally closed his office during the summer vacation—after all, with the campus practically deserted, there was no need for him to keep it open. Their business in California, like that in Boston, came from the universities’ professors and students whose work they published, but his assistant had sounded so excited over the telephone about the manuscript he had received in Lloyd’s absence that Lloyd had agreed to fly home to meet with the author and read the manuscript.

Margot had protested, of course, pleading with him not to go.

‘We have so little time together,’ she had reminded him, and of course it was the truth, but these past few summers he had somehow or other found that when he was with her, the intensity of her love, her need, made him feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. It wasn’t that he loved her any the less, he hastily reassured himself. How could he? She had given up so much for him, for their love, even to the extent of …

Pushing away his chair, he got up and walked across to the window.

He lived on the coast, and his apartment had wonderful views of the ocean. Whenever he had time, he enjoyed walking along the beach. When they were younger, the girls had enjoyed going with him, but they were almost grown up now, students at UCLA and with far better things to do with their time than visiting their ex-stepfather—he hadn’t had any children with Carole-Ann. When the girls were younger, he had often thought that he would enjoy being a birth father. He liked children, but during the few years he had been married, he had felt that it would almost be tantamount to being unfaithful to Margot to have a sexual relationship with Carole-Ann, even though she was his wife. After all, their marriage had been more or less a business arrangement anyway. He had thought that the presence of a wife and two children in his background added the necessary gravitas to his professional status, and she, after a bad divorce and two failed live-in relationships, had told him quite bluntly what she wanted. It wasn’t for sex so much as security, financial security and stability, for her and her daughters. And so they had married.

Margot had hated his marrying Carole-Ann; she had refused point-blank to attend the wedding or to meet with Carole-Ann and the girls.

Carole-Ann had known all about Margot. Impossible for him not to have told her.

‘I love her,’ he had told her quietly, ‘but we can’t marry and—’

‘Not in some states maybe, but you could go away together, abroad …’

‘No. To live apart from family and friends, in a kind of exile, that isn’t what either of us wants. Margot is inclined to be a little highly strung.’ He had paused, wondering how much he should tell Carole-Ann and then decided that it wasn’t necessary to explain to her that the pressure of their love for one another had already brought Margot close to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

‘I can’t give Lloyd up … I can’t. Please don’t make me,’ she had cried hysterically when her mother had intervened in their teenage love affair to remind them that they were by law prohibited from sharing their lives. ‘If you try to make us part, I shall kill myself,’ she had threatened, and both Lloyd and her mother had known that there was a very real possibility that she would do exactly that.

Then, he had loved her just as much as she loved him. But there had always been room for other things in his life; he had played sports in those days, enjoyed sailing and socialising. But Margot had become so upset about the time they spent apart, the activities that kept them apart, that he had unwillingly dropped them to please her.

Uncharacteristically, it had originally been her idea that he should marry. Family pressure had been brought to bear on them both to make him agree to move to California, but following his departure, Margot had immediately stopped eating and made herself so ill that her mother had been forced to give in and agree that Lloyd should return to Boston and to the island every summer.

‘You want me to marry, but why?’ Lloyd had questioned Margot in astonishment when she had first raised the subject with him.

‘Because, don’t you see,’ she had demanded passionately, ‘that way, no one will be able to object.’

‘What about my wife?’

‘You’re not to call her that,’ Margot had immediately flashed furiously at him. ‘She is not to be your wife … only I can ever really be that. She is simply to be married to you. It will be a marriage of convenience, that’s all.’

Lloyd had laughed at her indulgently at the time. He had felt very indulgent towards her in those days. Since his move to UCLA and his taking on full responsibility for their business there, he felt that he had become immeasurably more mature, a man of the world, whereas Margot was still very much a cherished and protected girl.

But then he had met Carole-Ann, and Margot’s suggestion had suddenly seemed to make good sense. There was a part of Lloyd that enjoyed playing the archetypal Bostonian gentleman’s role … of rescuing a woman in distress. And at first Margot had seemed pleased. It was only later, after he had proposed and Carole-Ann had accepted, that she had started asking questions, telephoning him at all hours of the day and night—a habit that she had continued even after he and Carole-Ann were married.