The Marriage War

‘Different,’ Sancha said, feeling reckless. What she really wanted to say was, Make me beautiful, make me glamorous, help me get my husband back! If only she could switch back six years, to the way she’d looked before she’d started having babies and ruined her figure!

While the stylist began thinning and cutting her hair she leaned back in the chair with closed eyes, thinking. But she was still going round in circles, deciding first to do this, then that, and afraid of doing anything at all in case it precipitated a crisis which could lead to the end of her marriage.

The letter might be a hoax, a wicked lie. She could be torturing herself over nothing. But if it was true? Her heart plummeted and she had to bite the inside of her lip to stop herself crying. What was she going to do? Was Zoe right? Should she confront Mark, show him the letter, ask him if it was true?

No, she couldn‘t—she was too scared of what might happen next. She felt as if she were standing in the middle of a minefield. Any step she took might blow everything up around her. The only safety lay in not moving at all. Not yet.

First she had to find out if there was any truth in the allegation. But how could she do that without asking Mark?

Tonight he was supposed to be having dinner with his boss, Frank Monroe, the man who had started the construction company and still owned the majority of the shares. Mark hadn’t said where they were having dinner, but it was either at Monroe’s house, a big detached place outside town, or at one of the more expensive restaurants.

She could ring Frank Monroe’s house tonight and ask for Mark, make up some excuse about why she needed to talk to him. If Mark wasn’t there she would know he had lied.

She sighed, and the stylist said at once, ‘Don’t you like it?’

Startled, she looked into the mirror and saw how much hair he had cut off.

Stammering, she hardly knew how to react. ‘Oh...well...I...’

‘It will look much better once I’ve blowdried it and brushed it into shape,’ he promised. ‘You can’t see the full picture yet.’

‘No,’ she said with a wry twist of the lips. She could not see the full picture yet; she must wait until she could. But Zoe was absolutely right—she had to know the truth. She could not rest, now that the poison had been injected; she could feel it now, working away inside her, like liquid fire running through her veins.

An hour later she left the salon looking so different that she almost failed to recognise herself in the mirror. Her hair was now worn in a light mop of bright curls which framed her face and made her look younger.

Before her hair had been blowdried one of the young assistants had given her a facial and full make-up, using colours she would never have picked out for herself: a wild scarlet for her mouth, a soft apricot on her eyelids, a faint wash of pink blusher over her cheekbones. Then, while her hair was being blowdried, she had had her nails manicured, but had refused to have them varnished the same colour as her mouth.

So the girl had painted them with clear, pearly varnish, and added a strip of white behind the top of each nail. That had given her fingers a new elegance, made them look longer, more stylish. Mind you, how long that would last, under the onslaught of Flora and the boys, the washing-up, the floor-polishing, the cleaning... who knew?

‘You look great!’ the assistants had told her as she’d paid her bill, and Sancha had smiled, knowing they weren’t lying.

‘Thank you,’ she’d said, tipping them generously.

Walking along the main street of Hampton, the little English town an hour’s drive from London, she saw the church clock striking the hour and realised it was now one o’clock. Only then did she remember that she hadn’t eaten.

She would have lunch somewhere really exciting, she decided, feeling free and reckless. She walked along the High Street towards the best restaurant in town, a French bistro called L‘Esprit, and began to cross the road—only to stop dead in her tracks as she recognised Mark on the other side. He had his arm around the waist of a girl he was steering towards the swing doors of the restaurant.

A car screeched to a halt behind her, its bumper inches away—the driver leaned out and yelled angrily at her.

‘Are you crazy? I nearly hit you! What do you think you’re doing? Get out of the road, you imbecile!’

Automatically apologising, her nerves frantic, Sancha hurried to the kerb and stood on the pavement, realising that Mark had gone into L‘Esprit.

Who had the blonde been? A client? Sancha remembered Mark’s arm around the girl’s waist, his fingertips spread in a caressing fan.

The blonde had turned her head to look up into his eyes, saying something to him, her pink lips parted, their moist gleam sensual:

It’s her, Sancha thought. She had never yet set eyes on Jacqui Farrar, but she was suddenly certain she had now seen her for the first time, and that it was true, the accusation in the anonymous letter. Mark had lied about what he was doing that evening. He wasn’t having dinner with his boss—he was having it with Jacqui Farrar. They would go to her flat and...

Sancha took a deep, painful breath as her imagination ran ahead and pictured what Mark would be doing.

She wanted to stand there in the street and scream. She wanted to run into the restaurant, kill Mark. If she had a gun she would shoot him, or the blonde girl, or both of them. She wanted to hurt Mark as much as he had hurt her. She would like to go home and pull all his elegant, expensive suits out of the wardrobe and chuck them on the garden bonfire, watch them burn along with his beautiful designer shirts and silk ties. While she was wearing old jeans and shirts Mark was always beautifully dressed. He said it was necessary for his image as a top executive.

He frowned at her shabby clothes and unkempt hair, but he had never given her a personal allowance big enough to buy herself good clothes. Oh, he made her an allowance, but most of that money went on clothes for the children. They grew out of their clothes so fast, she was always having to buy them something, and there was never very much left over for her. No doubt that had never occurred to Mark; he left everything to do with the children to her, and never questioned what she did with the allowance he made her. If they went out together she always wore one of the outfits she had had for years, but which still looked smart. At least she hadn’t put on much weight, but all her nice clothes were faintly out of date—not that Mark ever seemed to notice that.

But for a long time he had been looking at her with those cold grey eyes as if he despised her, was bored by her. She tried to remember when it had started—soon after Flora was born? No, not that far back.

Around the time Jacqui Farrar joined the firm? Her stomach cramped in pain. Yes, it must have been then.

The blonde couldn’t be more than twenty-three; her figure hadn’t been ruined by having three babies and her salary was probably good enough for her to afford tight-fitting, sexy clothes which showed off her figure. Mark had said once that she was clever, an efficient and fast-thinking assistant, but obviously it had not been the girl’s brains that attracted him. Having seen her, Sancha was sure of that.

Sancha wanted to kill him. She hated him. Hated him so intensely that tears burnt behind her eyelids. Loved him so much that the possibility of losing him made her wish she was dead. There had never been anyone else for her; no other men before him had meant a thing. She had had a couple of boyfriends, but Mark had been the first man she’d fallen in love with, and for seven years Mark had been the breath of her being, the centre of her life. She could not bear to lose him.

I won’t lose him, she thought fiercely. That little blonde harpy isn’t getting him. He belongs to me.

CHAPTER TWO

SANCHA swung round and walked back along the High Street, not really seeing where she was going and with no idea of what she meant to do. She only knew she needed to think the situation through, and she couldn’t bear to face Zoe until she had herself under control. Her sister would take one look at her face and know that something had happened—they knew each other too well; they had few secrets from each other. Zoe already knew about the anonymous letter, and it was typical of her that she should have read it; it would never have occurred to her that she had no right to read her sister’s private mail.

There was one secret Sancha did not intend to share with Zoe. Zoe had asked her if she had any pride—oh, yes, she certainly did! She was far too proud to let anyone, even Zoe, see how much it hurt to know that Mark was unfaithful to her.

Again her dangerous imagination went haywire, sending her images of Mark with the blonde girl, kissing, in bed...

No! She would not think about that. That way madness lay. She would simply go out of her mind if she thought about Mark and that girl.

She opened her eyes and stared into a shop window. A dress shop. She tried to be interested in the dresses displayed on brightly smiling, stiffly posed mannequins. One dress did catch her eye, a jade-green shift dress with a little jacket—she loved that colour. She leaned closer to look at the price ticket and her brown eyes opened wide. Heavens! She had never bought a dress that expensive.

Turning, she was about to walk on when she paused, frowning. It was so long since she had bought anything that pretty—why shouldn’t she be extravagant for once? She was in a mood to do something reckless. And, anyway, Mark could afford to give her far more money than he did. He hadn’t increased her allowance for ages, but now she thought of it he was always buying himself new shirts, new suits, new ties.

Taking a deep breath, she walked into the shop, and a woman turned to look her up and down, sniffing at her old jeans and well-washed shirt.

Her expression said that customers who dressed like Sancha were not welcome in her shop. A small, birdlike woman, with dyed blueish hair, she wore a pale beige dress that made her almost vanish into the tasteful pale beige décor of the shop.

‘Can I help you?’ she enquired in a chilly tone.

Sancha stood her ground, her chin up. She was in no mood to put up with this sort of treatment. Anyone would think that nobody ever wore jeans—but you only had to look along the street to see hordes of people wearing them. Maybe they never came into this shop? If they got this sort of treatment, Sancha could understand why.

‘I want to try on the green shift dress in the window.’

The shop assistant did not like that. ‘I’m not sure if we have it in your size,’ she said icily, as if Sancha were the size of an elephant.

‘The one in the window looks as if it would fit me,’ Sancha said sharply, wanting to bite her, and maybe that showed in her face because, on hearing her size, the assistant reluctantly produced the dress and Sancha went into a cubicle to try it on.

It was a perfect fit. What was more, she loved it even more when she saw herself wearing it, so she got out her chequebook and bought it, although it made her nervous to see the price written down.

‘I’ll wear it,’ she told the assistant. ‘Could you give me a bag for the clothes I was wearing?’

Still not ready to thaw, the woman found a paper carrier bag and put Sancha’s jeans and shirt into it with the air of someone who wished she had tongs with which to pick up the clothes. Her gaze flicked down to Sancha’s feet; a sneer flitted over her face. Silently she conveyed the message that Sancha looked ridiculous in that stylish dress when she was wearing slightly grubby, well-worn track shoes.