Beresford were staying there again. She was told they were. For hours she walked round the house, wondering, trying to convince herself that there was some mistake; it wasn’t true. In the end she got in the car and drove over to the hotel, knowing that she had to see for herself. Only when she reached it did it occur to Elaine that finding out might not be so easy. The receptionist might not give her Neil’s room number; he might have gone out. Even with this terrible suspicion in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to think of their room, that they might have gone out.
In the end it was terribly easy. It was late evening and the hotel entrance was deserted, the guests either out or eating in the restaurant. Looking through the glass doors of the latter, Elaine saw Neil sitting with a blonde girl. Even as she watched they rose to leave. Quickly, her mind panicking, Elaine hid in a darkened telephone booth. They passed quite close to her as they came out into the lobby and she saw that the blonde was very curvacious, her breasts almost falling out of her tight red dress. Neil had his arm round her and kissed her neck lasciviously as they waited for a lift. The girl giggled—and reached out to stroke him! Neil’s head came up and he looked round, making Elaine shrink back in her hiding place. Seeing no one, he put his hand over the girl’s and pressed it against himself.
The lift came and they got into it, Neil pulling the girl close, his hands low on her hips, even before the doors had closed.
For several minutes Elaine couldn’t move, then she rushed into the ladies’ room and was horribly ill. Immediately afterwards she ran blindly back to the car and drove away as fast as she could, tears streaming down her face. So much for her perfect marriage; so much for trust and love; so much for the father of this child she was carrying, the baby she had longed for for so longyears. Sobbing wildly, wiping the tears from her eyes so that she could see, Elaine just kept going, not caring where she was heading, only knowing that she couldn’t go home, that it wasn’t her home any more, the place on which she had lavished such loving care. All for Neil! All for Neil! Now it was just the place he came back to when he wasn’t with that girl!
She didn’t feel anger, not then; she felt only shame and a terrible certainty that it must be her fault, that he would never have gone to bed with someone else unless she had failed him sexually. That side of their marriage had not been a success right from the start. Neil had been a selfish lover, always taking his own pleasure, any excitement she might feel being incidental. He had wanted her to do things that she found unnatural and which she’d resisted, but instead of persuading her Neil had forced her to do them. She’d become afraid of sex, unable to relax, and Neil had got angry and hurt her, accused her of being frigid. During the first few years of their marriage she had blamed herself entirely; she hadn’t known that not every man treated sex almost as an assault course and left their wives bruised and frustrated. But she still loved him because she thought that she had made him behave like it.
That terrible night, Elaine found herself driving down an unlit country road. A car rounded a bend towards her, going fast, its headlights dazzling her. It hooted at her angrily. Her eyes blurred by tears, she swerved to avoid it, and ended up in a ditch. The other driver didn’t stop. She wasn’t hurt but it took an effort to climb out of the car and back on to the road. She waited for some time, expecting another car to come by, but the road stayed dark, deserted. Soon it began to rain. She began to get cold and had to climb into the car again and get her jacket and handbag. Reaching to where it had fallen, she felt a pain in her stomach.
Having no idea where she was, Elaine grimly began to walk to the nearest house so that she could phone a garage. But there was no house for miles and she ended up in a phone box, dialling for an ambulance, curled up in pain and knowing that she was losing her baby.
She didn’t tell Neil the truth about what had happened; never told him. And he never found out. By the time he had been ‘traced’ at his so-called conference, she was in hospital, the car retrieved by the AA and brought home with only a dented wing to show for what had happened. She told him she’d skidded off the road to avoid a cat when she was going shopping, the morning after she’d seen him with the girl. He didn’t bother to check her story, blamed her for what happened, yelling that she was a bloody rotten driver, that she ought to have had more sense and driven over the cat rather than avoid it. His parents blamed her too, and left her in no doubt of their feelings.
Neil was genuinely upset over the loss of the baby, Elaine was sure of that; he accused her of killing it often enough. Not that he needed to: as it was she felt consumed by guilt. She tried to make it up to him by taking better care of him: his clothes were always beautifully laundered, his meals cooked to perfection, and when he wanted sex she forced herself to be especially warm, especially loving; she even tried to please him by doing some of the things she found so abhorrent. But it seemed that wasn’t what he wanted from her any more. He told her to stop acting like a cheap tramp; she was his wife, for God’s sake!
The anger came back then, and the next time he took her she just lay there, not resisting but not taking part, her mind completely detached. That seemed to anger Neil even more, but he soon got tired of it, soon left her alone. He began to go away a lot more, sometimes staying away for weeks at a time. He had taken up flying, but never took her with him. Then one day he tried to do an acrobatic manoeuvre: it didn’t work, and he crashed the plane and was killed.
Shocked and stunned by his death, Elaine took a couple of months to get round to going through his desk. There were the usual papers, but in a locked drawer she found his diaries. It was all there, fully detailed and sometimes illustrated with erotic photographs—accounts of his affairs with women, some long-lasting, some one-night stands. Among the names, the faces in the photographs above the naked bodies, were some she recognised—girls she had thought to be her friends, wives of his fellow officers, even the barmaid from the local pub.
It had gone on for years. She looked back at the diaries for the years before he had met her and it had been going on then too. It was obvious from the comments when he had got some girl into trouble and his mother had bailed him out that she knew, had always known, even after he and Elaine were married. There was one very telling comment:
Ma was bragging about how I took one of the girls to bed at her anniversary party, right from under Elaine’s nose, while she was clearing the food away. It wasn’t a bad lay, although the girl was a bit tipsy. Can’t remember her name.
Reading through the diaries up until her wedding, Elaine realised she seemed to be the only one of his women that he hadn’t made love to at the first available opportunity. Maybe it had amused him to keep her a virgin until their wedding night. The diaries for the two years after her marriage she couldn’t bear to look at. Still couldn’t, she mused now. But she had kept them all, and whenever she felt down she read them, fuelling her strength and determination from the anger they created in her.
All grief gone, her heart a hard ball in her chest, Elaine had immediately sold the house, bought a small flat in London, and started her business on the remaining capital. Her mother-in-law had strongly objected, evidently expecting her to grieve like a dutiful widow for the rest of her life. But anger had given her life and still sustained her, so that tonight she had been able to treat Neil’s mother’s invitation with the contempt that she felt for the woman herself.
The next morning Elaine woke feeling heavy-eyed, but had to pull herself together and pack some clothes to take with her to the quinta where she would be staying for a couple of nights. She did some paperwork while she ate a belated breakfast, making out fresh check-lists and going through others, ticking off what had been done and underlining things that were becoming urgent. Afterwards she had a conference with Ned and Malcolm, making sure that they knew what they had to do.
This done, Elaine took her case out to the main hall and went to look for Francesca. She found her in the sitting-room talking to Michel, and would have excused herself but Francesca beckoned her in.
‘Oh,
