A Reluctant Wife

‘In other words, I have to go now so kindly remove yourself from my car.’

He stood back. Immediately she wound the window up, manoeuvred the car out of its parking space and raced towards the child-minder’s house. Just before she turned the corner she glanced into her rear-view mirror to see whether he was still there, but he had gone.

She was half an hour late, and when she arrived she found Jade, drawing intently in the lounge, with a stack of paper and crayons around her, happily unaware of her mother’s delay.

‘How has she been?’ she asked Sylvia.

‘A doll. As usual. Collected her from school at one, and she was full of it. Louise Dodwell has asked her over to tea on Friday and she’s thrilled to bits.’

Sophie smiled, and thanked God for the blessing of this small village where everyone knew her daughter and knew how to cope with her disability. How would she have managed otherwise? Oh, of course, she would have found a way, but it was so much easier to be surrounded by people who knew and understood and accommodated.

She approached Jade and spent a few seconds breathing in her presence, quietly treasuring the miniature copy of herself. It was a shame, she often thought, that her parents were not alive to see Jade. Then she walked directly in front of her daughter, stopped and spoke clearly and slowly, using hand movements as necessary to ask her how her day had been. She received a series of hand movements in response.

‘She’s not handicapped,’ the specialist had patiently told her years ago, when Sophie had first noticed that her daughter didn’t seem to respond to sounds the way she should have. ‘She’s deaf. Not profoundly. She can hear, but sounds are a distant rumble and make no sense to her. But deafness isn’t life-threatening, Sophie. You’ll need to take time, but you’ll be surprised at how well Jade will cope with her disability.’

Everyone in the village knew that Jade was deaf, and because all the children had grown up with the knowledge they always made sure that they were standing in front of her when they spoke. They were curiously gentle with her and from day one at school Jessie, Jade’s teacher, had learnt basic hand movements and had taught them to her class, turning the lesson into fun so that gradually the children began to mix their words with movements.

Sophie herself had read everything there had been to read on the subject from the time the diagnosis had been confirmed. She had taught herself how to talk, using her hands, and she had started fund-raising in Ashdown and further afield, money that would go to national children’s charities. All the time she was also relentlessly reliving the despair of her broken marriage.

In time, she had stopped thinking that Jade’s deafness was some sort of obscure punishment for being a failure at holding her marriage together, but thoughts of Alan still left a taste of bitterness in her mouth.

She tried not to think of him, but she knew that she would never again trust a man, never again open herself up to be hurt. In the space of five years she had grown up and shed her youthful vulnerabilities, like a snake that has shed its outer skin.

That made it all the more infuriating to find, as she lay in bed that night, that at the back of her mind there were suddenly images of Gregory Wallace, which flitted about like mosquitoes on a hot night, buzzing in the darkness, waiting to feed.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t lay eyes on him again or, at least, if she did it would be only in passing and from the opposite side of a street. She could always avert her eyes and pretend that she hadn’t seen him. It would be difficult since he stood out in Ashdown like a Martian at a tea party but not totally impossible. Really, he would be around very little. Tycoons had no part in village life. Their bases were always in London and the country house was the status symbol they escaped to once a month if they could spare the time.

When, the following day, she looked up at a little before twelve and saw him approaching her at the counter in the library she wasn’t sure if she was surprised or taken aback. Or both. She just knew that her stomach began to do weird somersaults and the counter, behind which she had been snugly cocooned, now felt like a cage from which rapid escape would be a problem.

In the cold light of day he was even more alarming than he had appeared the evening before. She could now see his face clearly—the harshly chiselled features, the intense darkness of his eyes, the aggressive line of his jaw. He walked with the confidence of a jungle animal, prowling its patch, and stopped on the way to her desk to say something to one of the people in the library.

For someone who had only just arrived on the scene he certainly had established himself, Sophie thought cynically. She assumed it was all that charm and good looks. Alan had had a similar effect on people. He had lived his life creating an outward impression, delighting in the adulation of people who only saw the smooth, easy charm and were ignorant of what lay beneath it.

She looked at him critically as he neared the desk, and remained silent as he finally arrived and stood on the opposite side of the counter.

‘I’m back,’ he said, as though she couldn’t see that for herself.

‘So I see.’

‘And has this bright, freezing day improved your temper?’ He looked at her, and even though he was only looking at her face Sophie had the unnerving impression that he was also taking in everything else about her—her body, her clothes, the way she was standing.

He couldn’t fail to be disappointed if what he’d had in mind had been a bemused country bumpkin eligible for chatting up. Her skirt was long, almost down to her ankles, in sobering black and grey, her tights were thick and her jumper revealed absolutely nothing of what lay underneath it. She had tied her hair back into a long, French plait and was wearing so little make-up that she might well have not bothered.

‘I take it that you’ve returned for your book on the wildly exciting history of Ashdown?’ She pointed to a section of the library just behind her and to the left. ‘You might find something there.’

‘Care to show me?’ He wasn’t smiling but she got the feeling that somewhere inside he was. Cool, urbane, amused by someone, she supposed, whom he considered quaintly lacking in social graces.

‘I’m afraid I can’t leave my post. I can get Claire to show you.’

‘You’re right. You can hardly wriggle out of your box for five minutes just in case there’s a stampede of people, wanting to take books out.’

‘That’s right,’ Sophie said coolly, not bothering to rise to the bait. She knew that she was being ungracious but she had unpleasant memories of men of his ilk, and if he didn’t care for her attitude then that was tough.

‘Why don’t we get Claire to man your post? Where is she?’

‘Oh, all right,’ Sophie told him. She lifted the flap of the counter and slipped out. ‘If you’d care to follow me?’ she said, glancing at him over her shoulder. Before he could reply she headed towards the local section of the library, stopping in front of the one shelf, which she pointed out to him.

‘I’m afraid that’s it,’ she said. ‘Your best bet is…this one.’ She flicked out a wafer-thin book, which she handed to him, and he obediently looked at it, turning it over in his hands.

‘Fine.’ He smiled at her and she grimaced politely in return.

‘Like I told you yesterday, Mr Wallace, if you want any detailed information it’s probably a good idea to chat to a few of the local residents.’ Not, she thought, that you probably haven’t already. Judging from what she had heard thus far, he was well on his way to having a bigger social life than she had, and she had been born and bred in Ashdown.

‘What about you?’ he asked, when she was safely back behind the counter and dealing with his membership of the library.

‘What about me?’ Sophie asked, looking up vaguely at him.

‘Why,’ he continued patiently, ‘don’t you have lunch with me now and you can tell me all about your charming little village?’

‘Sorry,’ Sophie said immediately, ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I work through lunch.’

He looked around him, as though mystified by that statement. ‘Why?’

‘Because…because…’ She sighed heavily and folded her arms. The library was hardly the centre of a buzzing metropolis. Right now there were five people there, if you discounted a handful of pre-school children who were regulars at the library and were generally accompanied by their harassed mothers.

Usually Sophie took over when they came, reading books to the kids and teaching them the rudiments of the alphabet. She enjoyed it and it left their mums time to choose books without the stress of their children in their wake. But none of this necessitated working through lunch, she thought, following his train of thought.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I just do.’ When he continued to look at her without comment she said irritably, ‘Well, all right. I don’t work through lunch, but I stay here and eat my sandwich and read.’ She threw him a challenging look, which appeared not to rattle him in the slightest.

‘Anyway,’ she carried on, ‘I’m surprised that you have time to have lunch here. Shouldn’t you be at your office in London? Working all the hours under the sun? Building your empires?’

‘Everyone needs a break from empire-building,’ he said, and the corners of his mouth twitched as though he was holding back a hearty laugh.

‘I didn’t think I’d said anything funny, Mr Wallace.’

‘Please stop calling me Mr Wallace. Not even my bank manager calls me that.’

Probably, she thought, because he wants to bend over backwards to be chummy just in case you decide to take your valuable business elsewhere. Alan had had a similar effect on people. They had always pandered to his need to be admired. Instinctively she scowled, remembering her naïveté at the beginning of their relationship when her head had been somewhere in the clouds and she had thought that her personality had drawn him to her.

Before she’d realised that all he’d wanted had been something strikingly ornamental to have draped on his arm. It made her hair curl now to think of how she had been so malleable. She had allowed him to dress her precisely as he had wanted—in dresses that she had found too revealing and shoes which had made her feel like a giant next to most of the other women with whom she had come into contact.

‘I’ve lost you,’ Gregory said, leaning against the counter with one hand tucked into his trouser pocket.

‘What?’ Sophie returned from her pilgrimage into the past and refocused on the man standing in front of her. She wished obscurely that she had never come into contact with him, then she reminded herself that she was being foolish because she hardly knew him and it was impossible for a complete stranger to have any sort of impact on her carefully regulated life. Still, it would help if he didn’t exude quite such powerful charisma.