Unexpected Pleasures (4 page)

At least no one but her knew about that. She bit her lip as she bent to unlock her car door, hot tears stinging her eyes.

There had been no one to grieve with her over the loss of that baby, no one to share her complex and conflicting emotions, no one to tell that, while logically she knew that perhaps it was all for the best, a part of her ached with loss and pain for that unborn child.

No, that was something that no one else knew, and sometimes she wished they did... sometimes she ached inside to be able to talk about what she had experienced: her pain, her sense of loss...her sense of guilt.

Despite the fact that it was over fifteen years ago since it had happened, sometimes she felt as close to it as though it were less than fifteen weeks, as though the wound, the agony, was still so raw that she needed to be able to talk it through with someone...that she needed to be able to publicly and openly mourn the death of her child.

But someone like Jake Lucas would never be able to understand those kind of emotions. She could just imagine his reaction. No doubt he would have told her that she was lucky things had worked out as they had, that such luck was far in excess of what she actually deserved. He would have no pity, no compassion...no understanding... He would reject her pain and her need to express it in just the same contemptuous way as he had rejected her, turning away from her to talk to his cousin, ignoring her as though she simply did not exist.

But he had come to see her afterwards.

Yes, she told herself savagely, to make sure she wasn’t going to make any trouble for his precious cousin.

Angrily she put the car in gear and reversed out of her parking spot.

CHAPTER THREE

‘A
NY
LUCK
WITH
Ian Davies?’

Rosie looked wryly at her brother-in-law.

‘Well, I haven’t heard anything from him yet, but he didn’t give me the impression that he was interested. He’s one of those men who isn’t really comfortable with women holding positions of authority in business. If Dad had still been running things, it might have been different.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘Still, it’s his loss as much as ours. I suspect his existing brokers are using his business to get better terms for their other clients instead of reducing his premiums.’

‘Did you tell
him
that?’ Chrissie demanded.

Rosie shook her head.

‘I only suspect that that’s what they’re doing,’ she told her.

‘Well, I think it’s all wrong that men should still try to keep women down,’ Allison announced passionately with indignation. At fourteen she was just beginning to lay claim to her independence, and was staunchly pro women’s rights.

‘I wonder how Gran and Grandad are getting on. They’ll be in Japan now, won’t they?’ Paul chimed in.

‘Yes, they should have arrived there by now,’ Rosie agreed.

‘I never thought they’d actually do it,’ Chrissie marvelled. ‘Spending a whole year travelling round the world.’

‘It’s something they’ve been planning for and dreaming about for years,’ Rosie reminded her.

Chrissie had rung her earlier in the day to check that she was going round as usual to have supper with them, a regular Friday night ritual which Rosie always enjoyed.

‘Did you collect your hat from the Hopkinses?’ Chrissie asked her now.

‘No, not yet,’ Rosie told her.

‘There’s a car boot sale on tomorrow morning. Fancy coming?’

Rosie shook her head.

‘I can’t. I’ve promised to go over and see Mary Fuller to help her fill out some claim forms. Her garage was broken into on Wednesday and some things stolen.’

She stood up to leave and was surprised when Chrissie reached out to detain her.

‘Not yet,’ she muttered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you. Allison, Paul, upstairs both of you, to make a start on your homework,’ she instructed her children.

Rosie frowned as her brother-in-law, too, disappeared from the kitchen, saying something about having a phone-call to make.

Chrissie had been on edge all evening, flustered and quick-tempered in a way which was out of character for her, and immediately they were on their own Rosie demanded anxiously, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

When Chrissie sat down, her eyes filling with tears, Rosie stared at her.

‘Chrissie,’ she exclaimed reaching out towards her. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Chrissie told her tearfully. ‘I’ve only found out this morning. I thought it was just my age... I mean, I
am
forty...but I’ve been feeling so uncomfortable, so bloated and sick, that I decided I’d go and see Dr Farrar. When she asked me if I could possibly be pregnant, I laughed at first...

‘Oh, Rosie, what on earth are people going to say? Allison and Paul? I feel such a fool. A baby at my age... Would you believe it? Greg is thrilled... Isn’t that just like a man?’ she complained as she sniffed and blew her nose vigorously.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘It’s just been such a shock...’

‘You’re not that old,’ Rosie assured her automatically. ‘Lots of women have babies at your age, some of them for the first time, and as for Allison and Paul... You wait... I’m sure they’ll understand.’

Chrissie pregnant... Chrissie having a baby... Although outwardly she knew she appeared calm, her words warm and soothing, inwardly her reaction was very, very different.

She could not be
jealous
of Chrissie, she told herself later as she drove home, having congratulated her slightly shamefaced brother-in-law who, as Chrissie had said, was quite obviously thrilled at the idea of another child.

Jealous of Chrissie... She could not be... She
must
not be. And yet, as she parked her car outside her own home, she acknowledged that she was.

Not jealous in the way that one might be of someone else’s material possessions or even someone else’s apparently more fortunate lifestyle; no, this jealousy wasn’t like that—it went deeper, bit more sharply, hurt her in so many different ways that she almost felt as though she wanted to scream her pain and misery to the world.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want Chrissie to have her baby. She shuddered at the thought. It was just... It was just that she... It was just that she what? Wanted a child of her own. A child she would have to bring up single-handedly. A child to whom she would one day have to explain and apologise for its lack of a father. Was that what she really wanted?

She didn’t know what she wanted, she acknowledged later; all she did know was that the control she had always been so careful to exercise over herself and her deepest innermost feelings was dangerously close to splintering. That the pain she had thought she had buried so deep that it would never, ever surface was growing inside her, threatening to overwhelm her.

She must not let it. She must not let anyone...anyone guess what she was feeling, especially Chrissie who, for all her strength, was right now feeling very vulnerable, and who needed her love and support.

* * *

I
N
THE
MORNING
she woke up heavy-eyed and on edge. Her sleep had been disturbed by confusing, unhappy dreams from which she had woken up with tears on her face.

She must stop this, she told herself as she prepared to go and see her client. She had heard about, read about women who became obsessed with their need to fulfil their primary biological function and have a child. It filled and sometimes destroyed their whole lives, occupying them to such an extent there was no room left for other things, other relationships which might have offered them comfort and compensation.

But, deep down inside her, Rosie knew that it wasn’t so much the desire to have a child that was causing her emotional anguish, but that somehow her feelings were all connected with the child she could have had but had lost. It was not just that she felt pain and on her own behalf; she felt it on that child’s as well. Pain and guilt, sorrow, anger almost, because her child had never been properly grieved for, had never been allowed to be acknowledged...because she had never been able to mourn its loss and share what she was feeling with others.

But how could she have shared it? To share it would have meant admitting what had happened, revealing what she had done, how she had behaved.

Did she really want other people to know about that? Look how Jake Lucas had reacted. Did she really want to see that same contempt in other people’s eyes, to know that people were talking about her behind her back, discussing what she had done...? And besides, it was all too late, over fifteen years too late.

But no matter how logically she tried to argue with herself, she still felt emotional and on edge. The thought of having to spend the next eight months or so listening to her sister talking about her pregnancy and making plans for the eventual birth of her baby made her stomach churn with tension and anxiety.

She felt as though emotionally she was stretched so tightly, so over-wound inside, that she was almost on the verge of snapping completely.

What had happened to her? This time last week she had been perfectly all right... Hadn’t she? All right, so she hadn’t wanted to attend the Hopkinses’ christening, and thinking about it had brought everything back, resurrected the pain she was increasingly conscious of having to suppress, but she had been to other christenings and had coped. What had been so special about this one, other than the fact that Jake Lucas had been there?

Jake Lucas. It was
his
fault she was feeling like this, she decided bitterly. It was because of him that she couldn’t enjoy the news of her sister’s pregnancy, couldn’t react with the unshadowed pleasure and enthusiasm she wanted to feel.

Jake Lucas... If only he hadn’t been there that night... If only he hadn’t opened the door and seen... It had all been over then anyway, her frightened struggles to escape from his cousin’s too powerful grip long since subdued and the damage done.

Jake Lucas. She hated and loathed him almost as much as he despised her. She smiled bitterly to herself. Much he would care. Still, she very much doubted that he was used to being on the receiving end of such a negative emotion from her sex. He was, physically at least, a very attractive and compelling man—even she could see that—the kind of man she would have expected to have had a string of women passing through his life, but oddly he seemed not to do so. He had a wide social circle of friends, but if he had a serious personal relationship with anyone it had not reached the town’s very efficient grapevine.

Good-looking, comparatively wealthy and, according to everyone else, with the kind of personality that immediately drew others towards him, he still remained single.

‘Rumour has it that he fell in love with someone years ago and that he’s never got over it,’ Chrissie had once remarked, but Rosie had found it hard to believe her. Jake Lucas, in love? He was too hard, too detached, his opinion of himself far too high to allow him to admit into his life the turbulence of an emotion like love.

It took most of the morning for her to help her client fill in her claims forms. The burglary had upset her, and left her feeling nervous and insecure, and Rosie, who had come across the same thing with other clients who had suffered similar robberies, let her talk, knowing that this was the best thing she could do.

Would she have felt any different, would her life been any different, if there had been someone for her to talk to? But how did you tell someone, anyone, anything like that? To explain what had happened, how her baby had been conceived in the first place, would have been hard enough, but then to go on to discuss her mixed and contradictory feelings over her miscarriage... How could she tell
anyone
of the relief she had first felt...relief at the death of her child, and then go on to expect them to believe how later her feelings had changed completely, and how guilty she had felt? As though in some way she had actually willed the miscarriage on herself.

Had there been any repercussions? Jake Lucas had asked her curtly the day he had come to see her.

‘No,’ she had told him stoically, denying the truth, keeping it secret and hidden, just as she had gone on keeping it secret and hidden ever since; but she had lied: there had been repercussions then and there still were now, echoing agonisingly through her life, through her.

These days there was counselling available to people who suffered trauma, but at sixteen she had been too young, and much too ashamed and frightened, to have sought out any kind of professional advice even if she had been aware that she could have done so.

All she had wanted to do when she left the hospital was to put the whole thing behind her, to lock it away in the darkest, most hidden recesses of her mind, where it could lie forgotten.

Only her guilt had not allowed her to forget it; it had driven her, relentlessly sharpened by pain. And it had been a twofold guilt.

Initially she had felt shame and anxiety because of what she had done because, even though she knew they would do all they could to help her, her parents would be hurt. She had not thought about the baby then, that had come later...a secondary and much, much worse guilt, a deep, more intense feeling of having failed another human being, of having let them down and caused them to suffer. Her baby had died and, even though logically she knew such things happened, she still felt that she was to blame, that somehow her baby had known that it was not loved...not wanted and that because of that...

And now Chrissie was having a third child. Rosie gripped the steering-wheel tightly.

She was not going to allow herself to be envious of her sister, to spoil the relationship she had with her with feelings of useless envy, to spoil the relationship she would one day have with her new niece or nephew with unhappiness for the child she had lost.

It was just gone lunchtime when she got home. On Saturday morning she normally got up early and drove into town to do her food shopping, while everywhere was relatively quiet, but today, because of her business appointment, that had not been possible, and now she realised she was virtually out of fresh food.

Not that it mattered. She didn’t really feel very hungry.

But she really ought to have something to eat, an inner voice nagged her. Neglecting her health wasn’t going to solve anything or make her feel any better, was it?

Grimly she pulled open the fridge door and surveyed its contents without any real enthusiasm and then closed it again.

The hot, sunny weather had continued all week, and her garden, especially the pots of flowers and herbs by the back door, all needed watering.

Originally built to house farm workers, her cottage had a very good-sized rear garden, which had been one of the main reasons Rosie had bought it in the first place.

Last summer, much to Chrissie’s exasperation, she had painstakingly laid a pretty, small, stone-paved area outside the back door.

It had taken up virtually all her spare time for the whole of the summer, and Chrissie had told her forthrightly that she would have been wiser to pay someone else to do the work, leaving herself with enough free time to concentrate on her own social life.

‘Honestly, Rosie,’ she had told her. ‘Anyone would think you
wanted
to be on your own. Every time anyone asks you for a date you tell them that you can’t because you’re working on that patio.’

Rosie had said nothing, not wanting to admit to her sister that inadvertently she had hit upon the truth.

Rosie assumed that it was because her job brought her into contact with so many men that she was constantly being asked out, unaware that it was her looks and personality that were really responsible for their interest.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Chrissie had demanded with sisterly candour.