had always thought that she would be pleased, when the time came, and proud. Yet the probability ahead of her loomed like a threat tonight. If she had a baby it would be born of the secret, hideous core of her marriage that she was trying so hard to conceal.
Isabel started guiltily. The silence was broken. Downstairs the front door slammed and she listened for and then heard the sound of Peter’s steps. It was too late to turn the light off. He would have seen it from the street, and anyway it was against the rules she had set for herself.
Hastily she picked up a copy of Vogue from her bedside table and began to flick through it, listening. Peter came heavy-footed up the stairs and then went into his bathroom down the corridor. Isabel heard the lavatory flush and waited, discovering that she was holding her breath. Once or twice Peter had gone straight into his bedroom and, from the sound of it, gone to sleep immediately. But tonight the footsteps sounded too firm and steady for that.
A moment later her door swung open. Peter was red-faced and his black tie was crooked, but his eyes were steady as he stared in at her.
‘Waiting up, eh? That’s heart-warming.’
Isabel put her magazine down and said in a neutral voice, ‘You’re very late, darling. Have you been somewhere important? I was rather expecting you for dimmer.’
Peter steadied himself on the way with a hand out to Isabel’s spoon-backed chair and then plumped down on to the bed. Isabel moved her legs away from the weight of him. He was frowning as he bent to untie his shoes.
‘Don’t for God’s sake start cross-questioning me before I’m in the house. I’ve been to the Coles’ for dinner, if you must know. Met him at the club and then went back on the spur of the moment.’
‘Couldn’t you have telephoned?’ Isabel asked mildly. ‘I would have liked to come too.’
Peter flung his shoes into the corner and then stripped off his jacket and shirt. ‘You made no secret of not liking them when I did take you. Why go through the performance again?’
It was true enough, Isabel thought. Sylvia Cole was strident, and Peter’s close friend Archer Cole was an ambitious politician whose climb up the parliamentary ladder had left him no time for finesse or social graces except when it suited him to switch them on.
Was an evening with Peter in their company preferable to being left at home alone? Isabel didn’t know, any more. At least she would have been with her husband, as a wife should be. And now he was turning on her with his bright blue eyes reddened with food and drink and the vein in his neck throbbing beneath his ear.
‘I’m glad you’re still awake,’ he said, his voice changing from belligerent to conciliatory. ‘Come on.’ His arm came round her neck and he lifted her off the pillows to kiss her. His mouth felt hot and spongy against hers and Isabel tried and failed to make her own relax.
‘Peter.’ She twisted her face aside. ‘My head aches tonight.’
His fingers grasped her chin and turned her face beneath his again. ‘I’ll stop it aching,’ he said. He was pushing her down underneath him, half lying across the bed and reaching down inside her nightdress. The fear that was always lurking inside Isabel now sprang up, suffocating.
‘I don’t want to,’ she gasped, struggling to free herself.
‘Well, I want to.’
He was very strong. Isabel rolled her head sideways to look at him, trying to gauge what stage he was at. Peter had a weak head for alcohol. Even when they drank together, glass for glass, she could see the signs of it in him before she felt them herself. When he was drunk he was oblivious of anything except getting what he wanted. But when he was drunk it was very quick, and she could bite the fear back and count, saying the numbers very clearly in her head like a litany, until it was over.
She didn’t think he was drunk tonight. Usually that was worse. It took longer, and he wanted things that made her shiver and the fear was mixed with humiliation and disgust. The fingers of one of his hands were winding themselves in her hair, and the others were fumbling and stroking, trying to coax her along with him.
‘Lovely Isabel,’ he murmured. ‘Do something, will you?’ He was wheedling her now, and that was even more frightening.
‘What?’
‘Roll over. Look, like this.’ Pulling and pushing at her, he made her roll over so that her face was pressed into the lace pillow. Then he was on top of her and she felt a shock of disbelief and then a wave of terror as she realized what he was trying to do to her.
‘No,’ she whispered into the muffling pillow and then, almost screaming, ‘No.’
His face was over her shoulder and she glimpsed the fine, blond hairs of his moustache pricking against the lace ruffle.
‘Let me try,’ he coaxed her. ‘I’ll be so gentle.’
And all the time he was pushing at her, trying to force his swollen self into the wrong place.
Isabel writhed from side to side, trying to escape him. But the more she struggled the tighter he held her. He was suddenly deaf and blind to the fact that she was Isabel, and the fighting, clawing creature that she had become seemed only to excite him further. His eyes were screwed tight shut and his face was drawn up into a scarlet pucker.
Isabel felt the disgust hardening inside her like a stone.
Peter was murmuring ‘Oh yes you will, oh yes you will,’ over and over again. Now he almost had her where he wanted her. Her wrists were imprisoned in one of his hands, and with the other he kept her head pressed down into the bedclothes. The weight of his torso pinned her down and his thick, muscular legs between hers kept them forced wide apart.
The murmuring stopped abruptly as he hoisted himself for an instant and then forced himself into her.
Isabel screamed, once. The pain was so severe that she thought she was split in half, but worse than the physical pain was her humiliation. That Peter should do this to her. That a man who had told her he loved her and promised to honour and cherish her should treat her like the lowest, filthiest object.
If this was love, this and the other nights separating her from the day of her marriage, then she couldn’t bear it.
At that moment, something snapped inside Isabel. The tears burnt her eyes, but she felt as if some vital part of herself had escaped from the body lying on the bed with Peter Jaspert jerking above it. She still felt the pain, and the tearing at her inner flesh, but she could stand outside herself and watch it happening with icy detachment.
She both felt and saw Peter slithering in his own sweat against her back.
She felt her tears, and saw her wet face against the white pillow. And then, when his shout came and his big body bucked over hers, she watched his contortions with cold, cold carelessness.
As soon as he had finished with her Peter rolled away and lay exhausted on his back with his forearm over his face.
Isabel was sobbing, and as soon as her body was her own again the blessed detachment from it was lost to her. She was just Isabel again, crying with fear and pain and revulsion. Where would she go from here? What would happen to them both now?
At
