Accidental Mistress Page 9

  ‘I can’t...’ She began helplessly, not looking at him. ‘I just can’t get involved in a relationship where I’m at the beck and call of someone else. I spent years being at the beck and call of my parents and I can’t go through that again.’

  ‘We are not talking about the same thing here.’

  ‘Not the same, no,’ she agreed, ‘but similar.’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  Her head snapped up and she glared at him with eyes which were filling up with tears and which would betray her, she knew, if she allowed it.

  ‘For you, maybe, but not for me. That’s the way I feel and there’s nothing more to be said.’

  ‘And what happened between us?’ he asked tightly. ‘No more to be said on that either?’

  ‘I enjoyed it...’ Lisa muttered. She dashed her hand across her eyes angrily, because he was forcing her to say things that she didn’t want to say and which her ears didn’t want to hear. She didn’t need to be reminded of how much she had wanted him because it would only show her how much she still did.

  ‘But enjoyment is not enough—not without your precious guarantees.’

  More silence. The mound at her feet was growing and she flattened it back down.

  ‘Fine,’ he said abruptly. ‘We’ll just write the whole episode off.’ He released her and she stumbled away from him without looking back, away from the treacherous night breeze that had felt like a caress against her skin only an hour before but which now felt like ice.

  She let herself into her room, had a shower, got into the oversized T-shirt which she slept in. Her movements were automatic. There was only room in her brain for one thing. Angus. He usurped every other thought. His presence filled the room, filled her head, filled her body until she wanted to scream, which of course she couldn’t do, so instead she covered herself with the blankets and stuffed her face into the pillow, and was trying to force herself to think of something else, anything else, when she felt a touch on her shoulder.

  She surfaced from under the layers of bedlinen and saw a figure sitting on the edge of her bed, and she opened her mouth to scream.

  ‘It’s me,’ Angus hissed at her. ‘Shh...’ He put his hand across her mouth and she stared up at him, dumbfounded.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said accusingly, with his hand still over her mouth, as though now he had calmed her he still didn’t want her to say anything.

  ‘Mmm,’ Lisa contributed against the palm of his hand. Her fingers curled into the sheet and she had the feeling that if she blinked he would dematerialise.

  ‘I don’t care to be blackmailed.’

  I was not blackmailing you! she wanted to yell, but again all she could do was mutter something incoherent, and she made another attempt to pull his hand away.

  ‘Not yet.’ He paused and raked his hair back in a frustrated gesture. ‘I think your attitude is puritanical and misguided.’

  Lisa grunted angrily in disagreement.

  ‘But,’ he continued, ‘since you don’t seem prepared to change it, I propose you move in with me.’ He removed his hand and for a second she didn’t say a word. Not a word. For a second there, when he had said ‘I propose’, she had insanely jumped to the wrong conclusion. The rest of his suggestion sank in like a stone into cold water. What he proposed was still the same—sex on his terms but with the boundary lines slightly altered. It wasn’t commitment.

  ‘I am not,’ she said in a deadly calm voice, when her vocal cords finally loosened up enough for her to say anything at all, ‘moving in with you. I am not going to be your mistress.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked in a low, furious voice that made her cringe back against the pillow. ‘What do you want?’ There was a tense silence, then he said curtly, ‘Marriage? Is that it?’ And when she didn’t answer he carried on relentlessly, ‘Marriage is not for me. I’ve seen the downside of marriage; I’ve watched my parents stay married, or should I say tied to one another, for no better reason than it was a habit easier to keep than to break.’ He leaned over her, dark, threatening, angry, his hands on either side of her body.

  ‘You say that life has no guarantees,’ she whispered. ‘Does it automatically follow that because your parents’ marriage was a bad one, then your marriage, if ever you do decide to marry, would follow the same course? My parents had an extremely close marriage.’

  ‘There is no room for debate on the subject, Lisa.’

  ‘And children?’ she flung at him.

  ‘Are for other people and good luck to them. God damn you, woman, I am offering you as much commitment as I’ve ever offered any woman. Take it!’

  ‘Go,’ she said, turning her head so that she didn’t have to look at him. ‘Leave me alone. I don’t want what you’re offering.’

  She could feel his eyes burning into her but she refused to meet them. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing left to say. He had laid down his terms and they weren’t good enough. Sure, he might be handing out the most he was capable of giving in the line of commitment, but it wasn’t enough.

  Did he expect her to abandon everything so she could spend an indefinite length of time, because she had no idea of where his boredom threshold lay, living on a knife-edge?

  He pushed himself off the bed and stood towering above her for a few seconds.

  ‘So be it,’ he said, then he walked towards the door and left, slamming it behind him, and only then did she fall back against the pillows with the sickish feeling of having been put through a wringer. Her head was spinning. She was quite sure that if she tried to climb out of bed she would fall down.

  She wished that she had had the sense to lock the bedroom door. If she had he would have had to bang on it to be let in and she would not have answered. She would not have had to listen to what was, in the end, the final insult. However much he was attracted to her, for reasons which she still couldn’t pin down, he would never marry her; he would never give her the one thing she needed.

  She lay on the bed with her eyes wide open and stared upwards at the ceiling, which she didn’t see. Her eyes were blind to everything except what was going on in her mind.

  He had told her that he didn’t believe in marriage, that it was an institution which had no place in his life. She wondered whether he was being truthful. She wondered whether the real reason why he would never marry her was far more fundamental than that.

  She was of a different social background—the most basic difference which Caroline had put her finger on almost immediately, and which she had made no bones about hiding.

  She didn’t honestly imagine that he would remain a bachelor all his life, but when he did marry it would be to someone with a suitable pedigree.

  How dared he call her puritanical and misguided, just because she happened to have a few principles?

  It was a shame that her principles hadn’t jumped to the rescue earlier, on the beach, she thought, but really, making love with him was something she didn’t regret. If she had turned her back on him and walked away, she would have spent a lifetime wondering.

  He had held out his hand and she had taken it; she had willingly let him lead her into a whole new, bright world which she had never known existed.

  Somehow, though, she knew that living with him would be a humiliating experience. She would never be able to relax because she would never know how much longer he would be around. And when the time came for her to walk away it would be a shabby, disillusioned parting. No, it made her sick just thinking about it.

  Better this way, she told herself. It seems hellish but there are fewer pieces to pick up now than there would be six months down the road.

  She closed her eyes and let sleep take over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS cold and dark and raining when the plane landed at Heathrow airport.

  Lisa stared out of the window of the taxi and watched the water slide along the glass. She didn’t want to think of that trip back, but it was as though her mind had reached an impenetr
able barrier and her thoughts could not stretch beyond it.

  Angus had not said a word to her for the entire journey. He had barely glanced in her direction. He had sat next to Gerry on the plane, and from behind them she had heard the low murmur of their voices and had miserably fed off the sound of his dark, deep tones, filled with an unspeakable yearning.

  The taxi finally cleared the congested airport traffic and began picking up speed on the motorway. The taxi driver’s earlier attempts at conversation had met with such blank unresponsiveness that he had eventually given up, but she gathered that it had been raining nonstop more or less for the fortnight that she had been away. Dull grey skies and constant rain that made everyone scurry along the pavements with their umbrellas up and their expressions pinched.

  By the time they made it back to her flat, sun and sand and sea seemed like a distant dream. At the time, she had thought the holiday was winding along very slowly. Now she realised that it had shot past like a bullet.

  ‘In a week’s time,’ Paul told her knowledgeably the following day when she turned up for work, ‘you’ll have a look at the photos and it’ll seem like a year ago. Ellie keeps telling me that the only way round that is to book another holiday the minute the last one’s finished.’

  Lisa smiled at him in passing. He had missed her. The paperwork hadn’t been done and some of their customers had been asking after her.

  She should have felt pleased and relieved to be back among the tubs and plants and dwarf conifers, but she didn’t. She had a dreadful feeling of unreality, as though she had stepped back into a life that was now in some way out of kilter.

  Two weeks later, when the holiday snapshots arrived through the letterbox, she sat down and looked at them over and over again and realised that what Paul had said was true. The reality of winter had put a stranglehold on her imagination. She found it hard to recapture the memory of blistering sunshine and long, lazy days.

  Routine and the humdrum business of living made two weeks of escapism seem like a mirage. If she thought too hard about it, it would all suddenly disappear and she would realise that she had been nowhere at all.

  Except, she thought, if that was the case, Angus would have faded into a blurry, distant image as well, a memory neatly stored away at the back of her mind. And he hadn’t.

  It was so unfair. She was trying so hard to forget, but his image lurked so close to the surface, waiting to spring out at her like an intruder. She could confine every area of her life but she couldn’t seem to confine her thoughts at all. One stray memory would creep into her head when she was least expecting it and then it would proliferate until it became a network of memories, strangling the imposed orderliness of her mind like an onslaught of ivy devouring a wall.

  The strain of pretending to the world that she was the same person she had been before was so tiring that it was nearly six weeks before some little thought process in her head registered something that made her go cold with fear.

  She had missed a period.

  She was sitting with her book on her lap and a cup of coffee balanced precariously on her thigh, when everything seemed to shut down inside her. Nearly a month late. She hadn’t even thought about it before; she had been too busy trying to get her life back in order.

  The following morning she went to the pharmacy, bought herself a kit and watched with a clammy feeling as a thin blue line impersonally informed her that her life was never going to be the same again. She was pregnant.

  I can’t be, she thought, staring at the little plastic tester as though it were something alien, but she couldn’t even begin to pretend to herself that it was wrong, that she had somehow fed it the right ingredients and had been handed back an incorrect answer.

  She sat down on the edge of her sofa with her head in her hands and felt ill.

  She had never thought that this could happen to her; it hadn’t once crossed her mind when she had lain there, on the beach, and made love to a man she was destined never to see again.

  She started to laugh hysterically, until the tears came to her eyes, and then, with shock, she realised that she was no longer laughing but crying. How could she have been so stupid? She, of all people? She could remember the talk her parents had given her about the birds and the bees. It had been more of a biological discussion about reproduction and she could remember her mother saying, ‘You might not think that it will ever happen to you, but it will and it’s as well to be prepared if you don’t want an accident to happen.’

  Well, the accident had happened, except it was more of a catastrophe than an accident.

  She lay down on the sofa with her eyes shut and the enormity of what had happened spread over her until she thought she was being engulfed.

  Why me? she asked herself. She was forever reading in the newspapers about couples who couldn’t have children, who had had to resort to fertility treatment. It had never crossed her mind that she could fall pregnant as a result of one ill-timed moment of passion.

  What was she going to do?

  The following morning, dry-eyed, she confronted Paul in his office and told him without any preamble.

  ‘I’m afraid I have some surprising news.’ She had to hold onto the edge of his desk because she could feel the ground swaying under her feet. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  There was a thick silence and she didn’t dare lift her eyes to his because she could imagine the shock on his face. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t been such an intensely private person, so in control of her life, the sort of person that these kinds of things just didn’t happen to.

  ‘You don’t look over the moon about it.’

  She finally lifted her eyes and saw the surprise still there, unconvincingly camouflaged under a show of cheery bonhomie.

  ‘You’re a dark horse, Lisa,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even think there was a man in your life.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ she replied shortly, then she regretted the abruptness of her answer because she could understand how he was feeling. Over the years they had developed a closeness of sorts and it would be as though he had misread her personality altogether.

  ‘It just happened,’ she said wearily, sitting down, ‘and I’m not sure what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Nothing rash, I hope.’ He looked at her sympathetically, which made her feel like crying, and reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘It’s not the end of the world, you know,’ he said awkwardly, but with feeling. ‘Your job here’s safe. Is there any chance that the father...?’

  ‘No.’ Her head shot up. ‘He doesn’t know and he won’t. This is my problem.’ She remembered Angus telling her that children were for other people and good luck to them. Unnecessary clutter, his voice had implied and he had swiftly moved on. It was a subject on which he had probably never dwelled and had no intention of doing so.

  ‘Thanks for, you know, reassuring me about the job,’ she said, clearing her head of unwanted thoughts.

  ‘Is there anyone you can tell? Any family at all?’

  ‘No one.’ It sounded forlorn, said like that, but it was true. There was no one, and the loneliness of her situation forced its way on her with a great wave of despair. Friends would rally round, she knew, but it would never be the same as having family support. In the end, she would be on her own. On her own with a pregnancy she didn’t want, on her own with a baby, on her own with every imaginable responsibility, although she told herself that she wasn’t the only person to have found herself in this kind of situation.

  ‘Ellie will help out, you know that...’ he said gently, and she didn’t answer. Ellie, his wife, was a dear. She had three children of her own, but like Paul she would be shocked at the news, shocked that the unimaginable had happened. As would everyone she worked with. They would all find out in due course. She would become a topic of conversation and, even if it wasn’t malicious conversation, the private part of her was dismayed at the prospect.

  But it eased her mind to know that her job was saf
e, and over the next three months she added a few more tenuous silver linings to the cloud. She had a roof over her head, and she had a few good friends.

  They had all been sympathetic, they had all hidden their curiosity about the paternity of the baby with a great deal of compassionate understanding, and they were all quite excited on her behalf.

  She needed it because she felt next to no excitement at all. She just felt sick most of the time and tired the rest, and anxious.

  She was beginning to show and occasionally she would glance down at her growing stomach with a certain amount of wonder at what was happening inside there, out of sight. When she did that, she did feel protective, but there was no counting of days on the calendar or strolling through baby shops excitedly planning what to buy. That, she thought, was more appropriate for women with partners, both sharing the joy of a new life in the making.

  It wasn’t for her. She just continued feeling vulnerable. In due course, when the time came nearer, she would buy things for the baby, but not yet.

  Summer was beginning to fade, with the blue skies becoming rarer every day and the nights drawing in, when Paul suggested an outing to a flower show. It would be quite an honour to attend because it was the first of its kind. Displays of selected flowers only, rare species, hybrids. Two complimentary tickets had been sent to them.

  ‘I can’t go,’ he explained, ‘because I’ll be abroad, but you go and take a friend. You’ll enjoy it. It’ll make a change from here.’

  Lisa looked at his kind, open face with gratitude. He had been marvellous about the whole thing, encouraging her when she seemed low and having her over to dinner at least once a week, ostensibly so that she could see a bit of family life at first hand but really because he felt sorry for her.

  ‘I thought you wanted me here to cover for you while you were in Germany,’ she said, and he waved his hand airily.

  ‘I think the place can spare you for a day,’ he said. ‘Have a day out. It’ll do you good.’