have envied her. There were others though, she knew, who looked at her and pitied her for her single, manless state.
That had never worried her. Better by far to live alone in contentment and peace than to suffer the kind of anguish which she knew all too well could come from loving another person. Especially when, like her, one had a propensity to love too well…too intensely, perhaps, and certainly too unwisely.
The chairman of their small committee was getting to his feet, explaining for the benefit of the audience the purpose of their fund-raising. Her stomach muscles knotted and tensed as she waited for her own cue, the moment when she would have to get up and hand over the cheque to Ian.
She had rehearsed her few lines over and over again and was surely word-perfect by now. All she really had to do was to add her thanks to those of the chairman, and then hand over the cheque to Ian.
At the back of the hall people from the local radio station and TV company were busily recording the event, and the movement of the camera, catching the light momentarily, distracted her so that she looked away from the stage and into the audience.
Quite how it happened she had no real idea; quite why she should so unerringly pick out one face among so many, and a face she had not seen in twenty years, moreover…Surely it should not have been possible for her to recognise him so instantly, to know with that gut-wrenching, heart-stopping surge of awareness that it was him, even from that one brief glance; but it was.
Lewis was here. Here in the civic hall…here in her home-town…here in the place, the life she had built so determinedly to exclude him…to exclude everything about him.
Everything bar the child he had given her; and the pain he had inflicted upon her.
Lewis Marsh…her husband…her lover. The only man she had ever loved…ever wanted. The man she had thought loved her in the same way…the man who had told her that he did love her, who had begged her to marry him, who had told her that they would always be together, throughout life and throughout eternity.
Eternity! Their marriage had lasted just over a year.
She started to tremble violently, her heart pounding with sick shock as her brain refused to take in what her eyes were telling her.
It must be a mistake; it couldn’t possibly be Lewis.
She had, out of shock and self-protection, already focused her gaze as far away from him as she possibly could, but now, like a child anxiously searching a darkened room for an imagined monster, she looked hesitantly back, searching the packed hall feverishly, praying that she had been mistaken.
Twenty years was, after all, a long time…long enough for mistakes to be made, for her memory to play tricks on her. The Lewis she remembered no longer existed. Like her, he would have changed, grown older.
The sickness returned. If she had recognised him, then had he…? She stopped searching. Her brain was trying to perform impossible acrobatics with far too many confusing thoughts.
What if by some impossible chance it was Lewis? Even if he had recognised her he was hardly likely to walk up on to the stage and announce to the world that she had once been his wife, was he? Why was she so afraid?
She wasn’t afraid, she told herself stoutly. She was just shocked…taken aback…and no doubt she had made a mistake anyway. It couldn’t possibly be Lewis. Why should it be? No; her belief that she had seen him was just a by-product of her nervousness about presenting the cheque.
Presenting the cheque! She tensed, appalled to realise that she had stopped following the chairman’s speech; that, in the space of half a dozen seconds or so, the purpose of her presence on the stage had been totally submerged by the shock of thinking she had seen her ex-husband, and now as she feverishly concentrated on what the chairman was saying she realised that it was almost time for her to stand up and make the presentation.
‘And so now I should like to hand you over to our chief fund-raiser, without whom this whole appeal would never have been launched—Lacey Robinson.’
Lacey stood up. She had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, and now, for some reason, as she got to her feet her glance darted almost guiltily towards the packed hall, almost as though she expected Lewis to stand up and announce that she was masquerading under a false name; and yet, even if by some extraordinary mischance it was Lewis, why on earth should he object to her reversion to her maiden name? It was he after all, who had brought their marriage to an end…who had announced that it was over, that he no longer loved her…that there was someone else…
This time as she scanned the hall there was no familiar male face, no malely autocratic profile, no sleek, well-groomed dark head—no one in fact who remotely resembled the man she had married, the man who had fathered Jessica, the man she had loved to the point where without him her life had no purpose, no reason other than that somehow she must keep on going for the sake of their child, the child he hadn’t even known she had conceived; the child he had already told her he wouldn’t have wanted.
‘You want domesticity…children…I don’t,’he had told her flatly, ignoring her feeble attempt to interrupt him, to protest that when he had told her how much he had loved her, how much he had wanted her as his wife, he had said how much he wanted her to have his children, how much he shared with her a longing for the domestic family life neither of them had ever really known—she because of her parents’death, and he through the divorce which had split up his parents while he was still very young.
Somehow or other she managed to make her short speech and hand over the cheque, although her hands were trembling violently when Ian took it from her.
Afterwards, when it was all over, Jessica came hurrying anxiously towards her, asking her if she was all right.
‘You had such an odd look on your face when you were on the stage. I even thought for a moment you were just going to get up and walk out. I know you were nervous, but I hadn’t realised…Anyway, it’s over now,’ she comforted her.
Lacey gave a vague smile.
‘Never mind, Ma, you were brill, despite your nerves,’ Jessica told her, tucking her arm through her mother’s. ‘And now how about that meal you promised me, before one of your admirers pounces on you and persuades you to let him join us?’
Lacey gave her a wan look. In reality the last thing she felt like doing was going out to eat. Her stomach was still performing somersaults and her heart felt as though it had literally been squeezed in a vice.
She felt both sick and shaky, like someone suffering from the aftermath of a nerve-shattering shock. She told herself that she was being ridiculous; that she was a grown woman, and surely long past the stage of reacting like that simply because she thought she had seen a man whose memory she ought to have put behind her years ago.
‘Quickly,’ Jessica hissed. ‘Tony’s heading this way.’As they headed for the exit she added drily, ‘Honestly, Ma, I don’t know why you don’t marry poor Tony. He adores you, you know, and he always has. Think of the life you’d have—he’d spoil you to death.’
‘I like him, but I don’t love him,’ Lacey told her, surprising herself as much as her daughter, who stopped and turned to look at her. ‘Is that so very shocking,’ she asked Jessica defensively, ‘that at my age I should consider love a prerequisite for marriage? I suppose to someone of your age it probably is.’
‘No…you’ve
