anyway. He had thought that the presence of a wife and two children in his background added the necessary gravitas to his professional status, and she, after a bad divorce and two failed live-in relationships, had told him quite bluntly what she wanted. It wasn’t for sex so much as security, financial security and stability, for her and her daughters. And so they had married.
Margot had hated his marrying Carole-Ann; she had refused point-blank to attend the wedding or to meet with Carole-Ann and the girls.
Carole-Ann had known all about Margot. Impossible for him not to have told her.
‘I love her,’ he had told her quietly, ‘but we can’t marry and—’
‘Not in some states maybe, but you could go away together, abroad …’
‘No. To live apart from family and friends, in a kind of exile, that isn’t what either of us wants. Margot is inclined to be a little highly strung.’ He had paused, wondering how much he should tell Carole-Ann and then decided that it wasn’t necessary to explain to her that the pressure of their love for one another had already brought Margot close to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
‘I can’t give Lloyd up … I can’t. Please don’t make me,’ she had cried hysterically when her mother had intervened in their teenage love affair to remind them that they were by law prohibited from sharing their lives. ‘If you try to make us part, I shall kill myself,’ she had threatened, and both Lloyd and her mother had known that there was a very real possibility that she would do exactly that.
Then, he had loved her just as much as she loved him. But there had always been room for other things in his life; he had played sports in those days, enjoyed sailing and socialising. But Margot had become so upset about the time they spent apart, the activities that kept them apart, that he had unwillingly dropped them to please her.
Uncharacteristically, it had originally been her idea that he should marry. Family pressure had been brought to bear on them both to make him agree to move to California, but following his departure, Margot had immediately stopped eating and made herself so ill that her mother had been forced to give in and agree that Lloyd should return to Boston and to the island every summer.
‘You want me to marry, but why?’ Lloyd had questioned Margot in astonishment when she had first raised the subject with him.
‘Because, don’t you see,’ she had demanded passionately, ‘that way, no one will be able to object.’
‘What about my wife?’
‘You’re not to call her that,’ Margot had immediately flashed furiously at him. ‘She is not to be your wife … only I can ever really be that. She is simply to be married to you. It will be a marriage of convenience, that’s all.’
Lloyd had laughed at her indulgently at the time. He had felt very indulgent towards her in those days. Since his move to UCLA and his taking on full responsibility for their business there, he felt that he had become immeasurably more mature, a man of the world, whereas Margot was still very much a cherished and protected girl.
But then he had met Carole-Ann, and Margot’s suggestion had suddenly seemed to make good sense. There was a part of Lloyd that enjoyed playing the archetypal Bostonian gentleman’s role … of rescuing a woman in distress. And at first Margot had seemed pleased. It was only later, after he had proposed and Carole-Ann had accepted, that she had started asking questions, telephoning him at all hours of the day and night—a habit that she had continued even after he and Carole-Ann were married.
‘Look, I don’t give a shit if she disturbs your sleep,’ Carole-Ann had yelled at him once in the middle of a row, ‘but I won’t have the crazy bitch disturbing me, and waking up the kids.’
‘She loves me—’ Lloyd had started to protest.
But Carole-Ann had cut him short, telling him in angry disgust, ‘She’s mad, obsessed, possessed by what she feels for you, but as for love … I don’t think she’s capable of knowing what that means. If she really loved you, she’d want you to have a proper life of your own….’
That had been one of the worst summers, the worst years, of his life.
Six weeks after his return home from the island, he had received a hysterical telephone call from Margot.
‘But you can’t be pregnant,’ he had protested in shock, his hand tightening sweatily around the receiver, his heart pounding sickly and heavily.
‘I’m five weeks late,’ Margot had screamed. ‘Five weeks! Oh, God, Lloyd, what are we going to do?’
In the end, it had turned out to be a false alarm, but it had been after that that Margot had announced to him her decision to be sterilised.
‘Margot, no,’ he had protested instinctively, telling himself that the tight sensation he could feel in his throat was the anguish of his love for her rather than that of any psychological sense of a noose tightening around his neck. ‘You could meet someone else, marry, have children with him …’
‘No,’ she had howled, the sound a primal protest. ‘I shall never marry, never. The only man I want to marry is you, the only child I want is yours. You’re just saying that because you don’t love me any more,’ she had accused him. ‘You don’t care. You—’
‘Of course I love you,’ Lloyd had protested.
At the end of the year, Carole-Ann informed him that she was filing for divorce. She had met someone else, she told him, shrugging aside his shock.
He had kept in touch with the girls although he had said nothing to Margot about doing so. She had, after his divorce, begun cross-questioning him about the places he went and the people, the women, he met. His was a lonely life; he had friends, of course, but his relationship with Margot had to be kept a secret from them. She at least had her family, their family, around her.
He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. His meeting with Dr Jamie Friedland was at two-fifteen. Danny, his assistant, had made all the arrangements. Since the professor was apparently still looking for an apartment, having spent his first term at UCLA in someone else’s spare room, it made sense for their meeting to take place at Lloyd’s apartment. Normally, he preferred to see potential authors away from his own home, but Danny had been so thoroughly excited about the professor’s manuscript that Lloyd hadn’t had the heart to remind him of that.
Certainly his work made very interesting reading—what Lloyd could understand of it, which wasn’t very much. But according to Danny, who could, it was a definitive work on its subject, breaking new ground and raising questions about established procedures other academics were going to find hard to answer.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lloyd saw a car turning into his driveway, a small European convertible sports model, driven by a redhead, her long hair mussed by the wind.
Frowning, Lloyd watched as she parked the car and got out. Tall and fashionably voluptuous, she moved with a confidence, an inherent liking of herself, that momentarily took his breath away. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a woman so completely at peace with herself. She was, he decided, the complete antithesis of Margot. His frown deepened as he saw her look up at his window before heading for the entrance to his apartment. Ten seconds later as his intercom buzzed, he heard her announcing her arrival.
Dr Jamie Friedland to see Lloyd Kennet.
As
