A Husband's Revenge

Muttering, ‘Stubborn little fool!’ he caught her beneath the arms and lowered her into the seat. A moment later he slid in beside her and leaned over to fasten her safety belt.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’ he demanded.

As soon as she was sitting down the faintness began to pass and the world stopped spinning. Lifting her head, she answered, ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘No wonder you look like a ghost!’

Knowing it was as much emotional exhaustion as physical, she said helplessly, ‘It’s not just that. It’s everything.’

He started the car and drove to the entrance, giving way to a small ambulance with blue flashing lights before turning uptown.

The dashboard clock told her it was two-thirty in the morning, and, apart from the ubiquitous yellow cabs and a few late revellers, the streets of New York were relatively quiet though as bright as day.

Above the streetlamps and the lighted shop windows, by contrast it looked black—black towers of glass and concrete rising into a black sky.

It was totally strange. Alien.

As though sensing her shiver, he remarked more moderately, ‘Waking up with amnesia must be distressing.’

‘It is,’ she said simply. ‘Not to know who you are, where you are, where you’re going—and I mean know rather than just being told—is truly terrifying.’

‘I can imagine.’ He sounded almost sympathetic.

‘At first you just seemed to be... angry...’ She struggled to put her earlier impression into words. ‘As if you blamed me in some way...’

‘It’s been rather a fraught day... And I wasn’t convinced your loss of memory was genuine.’

‘You thought I was making it up! Why on earth should I do a thing like that?’

‘Why does a woman do anything?’ he asked bitterly.

It appeared that he didn’t think much of women in general and her in particular.

‘But I would have had to have some reason, surely?’

After a slight hesitation, he said evasively, ‘It’s irrelevant as you have lost your memory.’

‘What makes you believe it now when you didn’t earlier?’

They stopped at a red light and he turned his head to study her. ‘Because you have a kind of poignant, lost look that would be almost impossible to fake.’

‘I still don’t understand why you think I’d want to fake it.’

He gave her a cool glance. ‘Perhaps to get a little of your own back.’ Then, as if conceding that some further explanation was needed, he went on, ‘We’d quarrelled. I had to go out. When I came back I found you’d gone off in a huff.’

Instinctively she glanced down at her left hand.

‘Yes—’ his eyes followed hers ‘—that was why you weren’t wearing your rings.’

It must have been some quarrel to make her take her wedding ring off. She racked her brains, trying to remember.

Nothing.

Giving up the attempt, she asked, ‘What did we quarrel about?’

For an instant he looked discomposed, then, as the lights turned to green and the car moved smoothly forward, he replied, ‘As with most quarrels, it began over something comparatively unimportant. But somehow it escalated.’

She was about to point out that he hadn’t really answered her question when he forestalled her.

‘I can’t see much sense in raking over the ashes. As soon as your memory returns you’ll be able to judge for yourself how trivial it was. Now I suggest that you try and relax. Let things come back in their own good time rather than keep asking questions.’

Questions he didn’t want to answer?

Yet if not, why not? Unless he didn’t want her to regain her memory?

Helplessly, she said, ‘But there’s so much I don’t know. I don’t even know where L..we...live.’

‘Upper East Side.’

That figured. It went with his obvious wealth, his air of good breeding, his educated accent. She frowned. His accent... Basically an English accent?

‘You’re not American?’

‘I was born in England.’

‘How long have you been in the States?’

‘Since I was twenty-one.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘Thirty.’

‘Do your family still live in England?’

Glancing at his handsome profile, she saw his jaw tighten before, his voice repressive, he replied, ‘I haven’t any family.’

Plainly he was in no mood to be questioned. But, needing to know more about this stranger she was married to, about their life together, she persisted, ‘Where did we meet...?’

He swung the wheel and they turned into a paved forecourt and drew to a halt in front of a huge apartment block.

‘Was it in England?’

Curtly, he said, ‘I thought I’d made it clear that I wanted you to rest rather than keep asking questions.’

Resenting the way he was treating her, she protested, ‘But I—

He put a finger to her lips. This is the Ventnor Building and we’re home. Any further questions will keep until tomorrow.’