‘No, they don’t expect it,’ Claire agreed, her voice and her manner suddenly a good deal firmer. She could be firm and indeed almost aggressive in her defence of those whom she deemed vulnerable and in need of her protection, Brad guessed—be it a child or an adult. ‘However, I want to be there. I’m sorry I can’t see you tonight,’ she apologised to Brad. ‘Perhaps tomorrow evening.’
The effects of his long flight were beginning to catch up on him and he still had to go out to the warehouse to see Tim, although he didn’t intend to start any in-depth investigations into the difficulties of the British distribution and sales side of the business as yet.
He was already aware of how on edge Tim was in his presence and he could guess why; the spectre of redundancy haunted them all these days. Just as it no doubt would have haunted him were he married with a not quite fully adult and independent family.
‘You should get married,’ Laura, one of his sisters, had scolded him the previous Thanksgiving. She and the rest of them had certainly done their best to find him a suitable wife. He found himself wondering for a moment what they would make of Claire and then quickly caught himself up, warily aware of how unusual it was for him to have such a thought.
It was her differentness that intrigued him so much, he reassured himself—the complexity and contrast of what he had so far witnessed of her personality.
‘Wow. Now that’s what I call a real man,’ Hannah commented, greedily munching another purloined biscuit when she and Claire had the kitchen to themselves once again. ‘He’s not at all what I expected. I thought he’d be all crewcut and loud checked suit.
‘He’s got the teeth, though,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Americans always have good, strong teeth… all the better to eat you with, my dear,’ she added mischievously, grinning widely when Claire gave her a suspicious look. ‘And he does look as though he’d be rather good at that sort of thing…’
‘If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting—’ Claire began primly, but then gave up, shaking her head as Hannah interrupted her.
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply saying that he’s a very… sexy man. Perhaps there is something in that old myth about catching the bride’s bouquet, after all,’ she murmured thoughtfully.
‘Hannah!’ Claire warned her direfully.
‘All right, all right, I know—you’ve taken a vow of celibacy and I shan’t say another word; it just seems such a pity that it’s all such a waste…’
After Hannah had gone, taking the rest of the biscuits with her, Claire walked slowly upstairs and then paused outside the door to the master bedroom, pushing it open slowly, with reluctance almost, pausing on the threshold before eventually walking inside.
This was the room she had shared with John throughout their marriage—as a bride and a young wife—but when she stood still in its centre there were no echoes of those years to ruffle its almost sterile blankness.
There was no sense, no awareness, no feeling in this room of people having lived intimately within the protection of its walls, of having laughed and cried, fought and made up, of having shared intimacies… of having loved. She had seen the way that Brad had frowned as he had studied the room and had worried anxiously that he too might have picked up on the room’s lack of those intimate vibrations.
It was strange how one became accustomed to things, adapted to them, accepted them and eventually came to think of them as the norm. It took something—someone different to make one see things from a different perspective—to make one realise.
As she smoothed down the already smooth cover on the bed Claire realised that her hand was trembling. Her marriage… her life… her… her privacy… they belonged to her and to no one else. There was no need for her to worry that someone else—that anyone else—would ever discover them, she reassured herself firmly.
The only way he… they could ever do so would be if she chose to tell them, and since she was certainly not going to do that…
Brad was halfway through his meeting with Tim when he realised that his wallet was missing. Mentally reviewing the events of the day, rerunning them through his mind’s eye, he pinned down its possible loss to the moment when he had leaned forward and then bent down to inspect the workings on the shower on his tour of Claire’s house. Glancing at his watch, he decided that it would probably be quicker and simpler to drive straight over than to waste time telephoning to announce his arrival.
Breaking gently into Tim’s long-winded description of the vagaries of the British weather and its effect on the sales of air-conditioning systems, he explained that there was an urgent task he needed to perform.
As Brad parked his car in the drive he saw that Claire’s back door was slightly open in the homely way he remembered from his own childhood, and without thinking he pushed it wider and walked in.
He found Claire in the drawing room, gently dusting the face of one of the silver-framed photographs. When she saw him she put it down quickly, guiltily almost, and for some reason the defensiveness of her action angered him, making him demand brusquely as he gestured towards the photograph, ‘Wasn’t there ever a time when you were jealous of her, when you resented her and wished that you came first, instead of always having to stand in her shadow?’
Claire’s flush, initially caused by a mixture of shock at the unexpected arrival and embarrassment at the way he had caught her behaving in her own home almost as though she felt that she had no real right to be there, darkened to one of outraged anger.
‘In your country it might be perfectly acceptable to make personal criticisms and to ask intimate questions, to pry into people’s personal thoughts and lives, but in this country it isn’t,’ she reprimanded him sharply. ‘My marriage—’
‘Your marriage!’ Brad interrupted her. ‘In my country we don’t classify the type of relationship you seemed to have with your husband as very much of a marriage,’ he told her scornfully. ‘In my country,’ he stressed, ‘no woman worthy of the name would tamely accept being pushed so obviously into second place by accepting second-best—’
‘My marriage was not second-best,’ Claire denied furiously. ‘I knew when I married John how much he loved Paula. I knew then that…’
‘That what? All he wanted you for was to care for the shrine to her that he had turned this place into? And you were happy with that… you accepted that…?’
The contemptuous disbelief in his voice stung Claire into defending herself. ‘You don’t know the first thing about marriage.’
‘Don’t I?’ Brad challenged her softly. ‘I know as much as any other man about what it feels like to be a man. Why did you move out of your—sorry, John’s—bedroom?’ he asked her.
‘I… After John died… I didn’t…’
‘You didn’t what? Like sharing your bed with a ghost? Funny that, since all your married life you’d already been sharing it with the ghost of his first wife.’
Brad didn’t need to hear Claire’s shocked gasp or to see the anguish in her eyes to know that he had gone too far, said too much. He had realised it almost as soon as the cruel words had left his mouth but, of course, it was too late to recall them now; too late too to curse himself under his breath and
