by name, but not by nature,’ he had said then. ‘Not with that warm colouring.’ And as he spoke he leaned forward and touched her hair. She had worn it loose in those days, falling thickly below her shoulders and kept off her face with an Alice band. She’d thought the style childish and longed for something shorter and more sophisticated, but her brothers had derided her, telling her she was far too young to pretend to be sophisticated, and out of habit she had deferred to them.
By some quirk of fate that summer they were all away from home. Gareth, the eldest, was in New Zealand getting to know his fiancée’s family, the twins, Simon and Philip, were backpacking in the States, and Jonathan, who was in his last year at university, had gone on an archaeological dig with some fellow students, and so for once Win was without her protective guard dogs.
Initially her parents were quite happy for her to see James. He was older, mature…sensible, aware of her innocence and youth—or so her mother later told her they had believed.
Win might have been innocent, but she was also in love, and she had made no attempt to hide her feelings from James. The first time he’d kissed her she had clung fervently to him, winding her arms around him, opening her mouth experimentally beneath his and then feeling her heart thunder in excitement as his grip on her tightened and she felt the hot eager thrust of his tongue inside her mouth.
Afterwards she watched him with luminous dazed eyes that betrayed the effect he had had on her. Beneath her thin cotton T-shirt her breasts ached and pulsed, the nipples hard, pushing out the fine cloth. James touched one lightly with his fingertip, gently rimming it, dark colour surging up under his skin as he told her thickly, ‘Next time I shall kiss you there, and then you’ll really know what getting excited’s all about.’
She had been so desperately in love with him, so completely without any defence against her own feelings, or against the sudden powerful surge of her own sexuality. And there was no escaping from the truth. It was the discovery of that sexuality as much as what she had believed was her love for James that had carried her so passionately into such an intense relationship with him.
She had wanted him so much that quite simply everything else had ceased to be of any importance, and because she had no past experience to guide her she had naïvely assumed that because she wanted him she must love him.
No one had ever allowed her to discover that the sexual urge could be just as powerful in women as it was in men. Just thinking about James made her body ache in ways she had never before even known existed. Of course she loved him, she cried passionately when her mother tried to suggest that it might just be a crush; that being in love was not the same as loving someone; that she was too young to think of committing her life to someone she had only known a matter of a handful of months.
She was over eighteen, and her parents could not stop them from marrying, she had pointed out defiantly.
What about university? her parents had countered. What about her future?
James was her future, she had told them.
Even James himself suggested tentatively that it might be better if they were to wait, but she immediately burst into tears, accusing him of not wanting her. He had taken hold of her to comfort her, and within seconds she was clinging eagerly to him.
It had been after the first time they had made love and she had confessed to him that, despite her promise to do so, she had still not asked her doctor for a prescription for the contraceptive pill that James had insisted on not just making her an appointment at the family planning clinic, but on going there with her. A baby at this stage in their relationship, or indeed for several years after they were married, was simply not feasible, he had told her.
‘You’re so very young,’ he had groaned when he saw her face. ‘Sometimes I think your parents are right and that we should wait, but I want you so much…’
They had been married two months later, much against the wishes of her parents, a quiet church ceremony because she hadn’t wanted to wait any longer to be James’s wife.
They had bought a small sturdy stone-built cottage on the outskirts of the town, and for a while, for a very short while, Win had been blissfully happy. James was a tender, considerate lover, gradually allowing her to discover her sexuality, and it was only years later, long after their divorce, that she actually realised how much he himself must have been holding himself back.
He had been unselfish and loving to her then, cherishing her, loving her, laughing when she burned his meals and he had to iron his own shirts. When flushed with mortification and shame, she had asked him if he regretted marrying her, he had taken her in his arms and told her that it wasn’t her housewifely skills he had married her for.
‘Besides,’ he had whispered against her mouth, ‘after Christmas you’ll be starting college, and you won’t have time for ironing and cooking then.’
That had been a bone of contention between them. Win had been quite content to be his wife, wanting nothing more, but he had insisted that, while she might have given up her chance to go to university, that did not mean she could not take a degree course here at home.
‘What do I need a degree for now?’ she had asked him. ‘I don’t want a career. Just you and our children.’
James had looked at her seriously.
‘You’re so young, Win,’ he had told her. ‘You think that now, but one day…’
They had argued about it, but he had been insistent, and then had come her flu and Charlie’s conception.
Had it been because she had known how he would feel that she had deliberately kept back the news for as long as she could?
When she had finally broken the news to him, at first he had been shocked and angry. Through her tears she had watched him pacing their sit-ting-room as he told her, ‘It’s too soon, Win. We still hardly know one another.’
And she had discovered over the months that followed how little she knew him.
He had changed his job, getting one that paid far more money in the city, so that consequently she hardly ever saw him.
Her family, to whom she turned for sympathy and company, seemed to share James’s view that her pregnancy was something that should simply not have happened so early on in their marriage.
‘Of course I shan’t be able to go to college now,’ she had said to James, and had winced as she saw the look in his eyes. It was almost as though he had thought she had deliberately got pregnant so that she wouldn’t have to go to college.
The first rifts in their relationship had begun.
And then had come the evening James had told her they had to attend a company function. She had been seven months pregnant at the time and feeling acutely uncomfortable; perhaps because she was so small, with her pregnancy, she had become very large, the slowing down of her body irritating and hampering her.
They had ceased making love. Win had been so angry with James when he had not welcomed the news of her pregnancy that when he attempted to touch her she had pushed him away, and now he no longer tried to touch her. She ached for him to do so, but pride wouldn’t allow her to find the words to tell him, and a small festering worm of misery suggested to her that perhaps he no longer wanted to make love to her now that she was pregnant and so enormous.
And then, at his new firm’s annual
