It had been Andrea who almost collapsed following the death of their father from a heart-attack, her grief driving her to the edge of a nervous breakdown, even though neither of them had seen him since his divorce from their mother ten years previously.
Jessica had been stunned to discover that they had been included in their father’s will along with the two children from his second marriage. Following the break-up of their parents’ marriage her father had emigrated to Australia, where he had done very well for himself financially.
Jessica had gone to his funeral: Andrea had not been well enough to make the flight, but Jessica had felt totally out of place there; a stranger who had no right to be amongst the grieving family of a man whom she barely knew.
It had been following her father’s death, as a catharsis for the guilt she had unexpectedly felt, that she had written her first book; basing it on research which she had spent almost two years gathering. The book dealt with the problems arising from the break-up of family units and its effect on the members of those families and its publication so soon after she had obtained her degree in psychology had caused quite a stir.
She had followed it up eighteen months ago with a more detailed study on the long-lasting effects of childhood events, including parental divorce, on children, and that book too had been received very well. She had, or so her publisher claimed, a facility for explaining the most obscure technical data in a way that made for easy reading and absorption.
However, as Jessica had discovered, success brought its own problems, and in her case the most unpleasant of these was the decidedly unpleasant knowledge that her brother-in-law appeared to have switched what shallow affections he had from her sister to herself.
Had Andrea been a stronger character Jessica could simply have told her how unwelcome her husband’s advances were, but then had she been a stronger character, she would have never married a man like David in the first place.
Physically as well as emotionally Jessica found that he repelled her. It had come to the point now where if he so much as touched her she could feel her body stiffening, his effect on her much the same as that on a cat whose coat has been stroked the wrong way. If it hadn’t been for Andrea she would have had no compunction in telling him exactly what she thought of him, but that was not possible.
Her sister, now in her third month of a very precarious pregnancy, had developed a paranoid fear of losing her husband, which seemed to focus on what she believed to be Jessica’s desire for him, and David, recognising the weapon his wife had put into his hand, was taking every opportunity of using it.
It was useless for Jessica to tell her sister that she had no emotional interest in David. Andrea would not be convinced. Jessica suspected that Andrea did not want to be convinced, because privately she was well aware that David was unfaithful to her, and for some reason she preferred to believe that this unfaithfulness involved her own sister rather than someone else—a stranger whom she could not manipulate by using the emotional tie between them.
‘Jessica … promise me you won’t see him again … I know you saw him last night … he was out until gone two … I rang you … you were out too … Please don’t insult me by lying about it … I know how you feel about him.’
Holding on to her self-control Jessica muttered beneath her breath, ‘I wish to God you did.’ Her fingers gripping the phone were damp and she could feel the tension spiralling up inside her. She knew quite well that Andrea needed medical attention, but David, because it suited him to pretend otherwise, refused to consult their doctor about her deteriorating mental condition.
Only last week when Jessica had pointed out to him how debilitating and dangerous her sister’s neuroses were becoming, especially in her pregnant condition, David had merely shrugged his shoulders and suggested slyly, ‘Well, since she already thinks we’re having an affair, why don’t we?’
His vanity and cruelty both sickened Jessica; sometimes she felt as though she were caught in a miasma of deceit from which there was no escape. She personally loathed lies and deception. It had shaken her world to its foundations when their parents split up, even though her mother had explained carefully to her at the time that it was a mutual decision.
Certainly as far as divorces go it had been reasonably amicable. Her mother had re-married nine years ago when Jessica started university and now lived in Canada with her new husband, who had offered both Andrea and herself a home. Guy was a nice enough man; he adored her mother but, as Jessica had learned from her own research, what a child wanted, no matter what the impracticalities and impossibilities as far as the adults were concerned, were for its two parents to be together, and since all adults carry within them the ghost of the child they had been, the feeling of desertion and betrayal that comes from being a child of a broken marriage never completely fades. It can be rationalised away, analysed and accepted, but something of it is always there.
She had no delusions about herself, or others; David wanted her now because she had something Andrea did not have—academic success. It would suit David very nicely to be the husband of a successful woman, but not for long. A man of David’s low emotional stature would very soon find those small cruel ways of undermining such a wife; those tiny, unkind gibes in public that she had so often heard exchanged by other couples. But there was no question and never had been of her marrying David, or anyone, come to think of it, she thought wryly. Her life had been so busy that there had never been any time for her to form a lasting relationship, and for her, marriage was something that had to be based on more than mere physical lust. Love, or what commonly passed for it, was no basis for security; better to marry for political, financial and practical reasons; to make a contract with another person and stick to it than to risk so much on the mere irrational whim of one’s hormones!
And that was to be the basis of her next book. At the moment she was deeply engrossed in her work on this book and what she had researched so far confirmed her views that so called ‘arranged’ marriages, provided they were motivated purely by a parental desire to achieve the best possible chance of happiness and contentment for a child, had more chance of succeeding than any others.
It was to be a radical and challenging book when it was finished, and Jessica had no doubt that she would receive an awful lot of flak about it, but she was sincerely convinced that she was right in her views.
In a surprising number of cases though, she had discovered that love had grown from these ‘arranged’ marriages, and although she was rather loath to admit it, that rather upset her theory that ‘love’ was not a necessary ingredient for success.
‘Jessica, are you listening to me?’
Andrea’s voice was high-pitched with hysteria. ‘Promise me that you’ll give David up, that you won’t see him again.’
This was getting ridiculous. She fought down an urge to tell her sister not to be so stupid, and instead said patiently, ‘Andrea, David means nothing to me.’
‘You’re lying. I know he’s seeing someone and if it isn’t you then …’
The high-pitched voice was suddenly silent, tension humming along the wire as though her sister had suddenly discovered a chasm had opened at her feet. As indeed she probably had, Jessica thought tiredly. Poor Andrea. If she was to accept that her sister was not having an affair with her husband then that meant she must accept that he was in all probability having one with someone else, someone she could not control so easily. And it wouldn’t be his first affair, Jessica thought angrily.
‘Andrea, try to calm down,’ she said quietly. ‘Think of the baby.’
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