Bitter Betrayal

Now Luke’s mother was dead. She had died several months after Luke had married…

Automatically Jenneth ducked her head, letting her hair swing forward to conceal her expression, even though there was no one there to see her. Even now, the thought of that agonising time when Luke had told her so clinically and coldly, as though every word he said to her had to be weighed and accounted for, that he was marrying someone else—a someone else who had already conceived his child—still had an overpowering and disturbing effect on her.

How often had she told herself that thousands of young women were rejected by men they thought loved them, and that they, unlike her, went on to form other, lasting, less destructive relationships without any difficulty at all? How often had she chided herself both verbally and mentally for behaving like a wilting Victorian heroine, falling into what used to euphemistically be called a ‘decline’ because her world had been turned upside-down by the discovery that the love she had thought its surest foundation had never really existed?

Oh, outwardly she had done all the right things: listened to Luke’s cruel revelations with a white face and burning eyes, breaking down only once, when he had told her about the coming baby. She had been stunned and reached for him disbelievingly, sick with shock and pain, but he had not responded. And in the months that followed she had put on as brave a face as she could, finishing her time at university, refusing to give in to the cowardly temptation not to go home for the holidays, prattling with mock sophistication to her friends about the life she was leading…the men she was dating…

Her parents had seen through her, though…and, aware of her anguish and, she suspected, of the deep wound Luke had dealt to the very essence of her womanhood, had announced that her father was taking semi-retirement and that they were all moving back to York, which had been her father’s childhood home.

It had been a measure of the depth of the love she had once felt for Luke that she had almost refused to go with them…hoping against hope for the miracle that would give Luke back to her, unable to believe even now that it was really over. And then she had seen him in the village, with his wife and their child…He had been holding the baby, while his wife was talking earnestly to another couple. She had stopped dead in the street, measuring the distance between them and ignominiously preparing for flight. The baby had had dark hair like Luke’s…A little girl, so Louise had told her apologetically, with embarrassment and compassion…And the girl who was his wife…younger than Jenneth, dark-haired, welldressed and almost shy, she had looked at Jenneth, obviously not realising who she was, and had then turned to Luke, saying quite clearly as she took the baby from him, ‘Come along, darling—I think it’s time we left.’

Sick at heart, Jenneth hadn’t gone home, but had gone instead down the path along the river, a favourite haunt from her early teens where she used to idle her way home from school after she’d left Louise, daydreaming about life and Luke with all the innocence of her extreme youth.

Now, with a cynicism that sat oddly on her slender shoulders, she wondered what would have happened if she too had conceived Luke’s child. And it had been a distinct possibility: right up to the very weekend before he had announced that he was ending their engagement and why, Luke had been trying to persuade her to allow them to become lovers.

She closed her eyes abruptly, not wanting to remember the fiercely impassioned way he had made love to her that summer, breaking off when she had pleaded with him to stop, as she tremulously explained that he would be her first lover, and that she was afraid.

He had seemed to understand, teasing her about her fears, but she had thought that underneath his amusement he had been pleased that he would be her first lover.

How often during those first arid months without him had she asked herself if things would have been different had she been different? But she had stalwartly refused to allow herself to believe that, if Luke had really loved her, he would have turned to someone else for the sexual satisfaction she had not given him.

His betrayal of her, though, had had a lasting effect on her awareness of herself as a woman, destroying something so intrinsic within her that, as the years passed, she had privately likened herself to an animated doll without any real deep inner core…love, desire, all the emotions which filled the lives of other people were a foreign territory to her. She loved the twins, of course, and she enjoyed the company of her few good friends, but in a one-to-one relationship with a man she discovered that she just could not function…The mere hint of anything approaching intimacy made her remember how she had suffered through Luke’s rejection, and as the years passed she had deemed it wiser to hold the male sex well at bay. And now Louise was getting married…her friend who had always been so fiercely independent.

She knew that most people who knew her put her single state down to the responsibility she felt for the twins. It was a convenient excuse, but one she would no longer have once they were at university. Not that men were exactly beating a path to her door, urgently exclaiming their desire…She grimaced a little at the thought, mentally reviewing the men who had invited her out recently. There was Colin Ames, the local vet, a kind-hearted, raw-boned man, divorced with three small children, who was quite obviously looking for a substitute mother not just for his children, she suspected, but for himself as well.

There was Greg Pilling, who at thirty-five was still single, and considered something of a heartbreaker locally; he had a large house on the other side of the village and business interests which took him to London for four days out of every seven. Privately Jenneth suspected he was involved with someone down there whose identity he wished to keep secret for reasons best known to himself…because she was already married? Jenneth wondered cynically.

There were one or two others, pleasant, kind men who were quite obviously excellent husband and father material, but she refused to allow herself to get involved.

It wasn’t so much what Luke had done, she told herself these days, it was the fact that he had had the power to do it that made her avoid emotional commitments…it was the memory of her own intense vulnerability that kept her from allowing anyone too close to her.

Of course, in the years immediately following her parents’ deaths, any kind of intimate relationship with a man had been impossible. The twins had needed her too much, and her life had been so closely tied up with theirs that there was no space in it for anyone else. But now the twins were virtually adult—and it was Louise who had unwillingly forced her into this introspective mood, Jenneth reflected wryly, standing up and acknowledging that it was impossible now to try and concentrate on her work.

It was too late now to wish she had not made the commitment to attend the wedding, even if Luke was not going to be there…there would be other people there who would remember…

What? That she and Luke had been engaged, eight years ago, for the space of less than six months? That that engagement had been broken and that Luke had married someone else, and that subsequently they had had a child? So what? It was only in her own mind that the spectre of Luke’s rejection loomed so destructively…

Sometimes she suspected that Louise saw more than she said, even though her friend had accepted her explanations at face-value when she’d come home to discover that the engagement was over and that Luke was married to someone else.

It had been Louise who had given her the news some years ago that Luke’s wife was dead…a postscript added to a birthday card that had shocked her into a week of nightmare dreams of such intense reality that she had woken from them sweating and crying, shivering under the burden of knowing that even now Luke had the power to affect her intensely both emotionally and physically.

That had been the year Louise had coaxed her to go home with her for Christmas, and because the twins had pleaded with her to accept the invitation she had given way, never expecting to find that Luke was also at home, visiting his aunt and uncle.

His father lived in America now, and Luke, who had followed his father into medicine, was a consultant at one of the large teaching hospitals.

The sight of him, so familiar and once so desperately dear, had frozen her to the floor of Louise’s parents’ hallway. The twins, walking in behind her, had bumped into her…Someone had made the necessary introductions, she couldn’t remember who, and under cover of the general noise and confusion she had found herself confronting Luke, while her insides cringed with remembered anguish and misery, and she masked her face with the cool, remote smile she had perfected.

He had had his daughter with him, a bright, mischievous three-year-old, who plainly adored her daddy, and looked so like him that Jenneth had felt as though someone had slid a knife into her heart and turned it.

For some unfathomable reason she still didn’t understand, and which had seemed unreasoningly cruel of fate, Luke’s daughter had chosen to attach herself both to Jenneth and the twins, following them everywhere, watching them with Luke’s dark green eyes, smiling at them with Luke’s smile, but Jenneth had resisted the aching, yearning need within her to respond to the child’s overtures, to pick her up and cuddle her, to open her arms to her and hold her as she so plainly wanted to be held, with something approaching Luke’s proud, contemptuous disdain of her.

She remembered how Luke had walked into the sitting-room one day while she was there alone with Angelica, desperately trying to withstand the child’s very obvious desire for feminine affection. He had picked his daughter up, plainly recognising both the withdrawal and rejection in Jenneth’s refusal to touch his child, his mouth grim with dislike of her where once it had been soft with desire and love…or so she had thought. But that of course had just been an illusion.

She hadn’t realised how he had interpreted the twins’ adolescent teasing about the fact that she had very recently ended a brief relationship with one of her clients; nor that he had assumed quite wrongly from her brothers’ totally erroneous description of that relationship that she and Christopher Harding had been lovers, but the barbed comment he had made to her about the dullness of his aunt and uncle’s home without the presence of her lover to enliven it for her had been something she had seized gladly upon to bolster her shaky pride, smiling insincerely back at him as she said lightly, ‘It’s only for a week…’

And Luke had responded jeeringly, ‘And you can live quite easily without him in your bed for that length of time, is that it?’

And then, with a rush of anger she could only regret later, she had retaliated rashly—and thoroughly untruthfully—saying, ‘Christopher and I have been lovers for quite some time,’ and then from somewhere she had produced a feline smile, and added, ‘He goes away on business quite a lot, and when he does…’

‘You replace him in your bed with someone else,’ Luke had finished for her, totally misunderstanding what she had been about to say, which was that when Christopher was away she coped quite adequately without him. Before she could correct him, he had continued bitterly, ‘How you’ve changed. And to think that—’

He had stopped speaking as the twins came bursting into the room, and after that they had each studiously avoided the other, Luke taking good care to make sure his small daughter came nowhere near her.

She had told herself that she had been glad…glad that she had finally shown him that she was a woman and desirable to others, even if not to him…glad that she had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him or with his child…glad that she had finally and irrevocably broken away from the old Jenneth, who had adored him to the point of lunacy, who had loved him just as intensely…and who had gone on loving him long after he had made it plain that he most certainly did not love her.

And that had been the last time she had seen him.

CHAPTER TWO

AS THE date of Louise’s wedding drew closer, Jenneth found herself regretting more and more that she had agreed to go. It was not that she didn’t want to see her friend married and wish her and her new husband good luck; she did, and, had Louise chosen anywhere but Little Compton as the venue for her wedding, Jenneth knew that she would have been anticipating it with a glad heart, and more than a touch of delighted curiosity about the man who had so radically changed her old friend’s determined stance on the joys of the single state.

As it was, even with Louise’s reassurance that Luke would not be attending the wedding, she was increasingly conscious of the fact that there would be other people there who remembered her younger self, and her love for Luke; they would remember their engagement and Luke’s subsequent marriage to someone else; and then, in the manner of village people the world over, they would look at her ringless hands and speculate among themselves as to the reasons for her unmarried state.

Standing in her studio, she gave a tiny shudder of revulsion at the thought of their curiosity and pity, wishing that she had the courage to telephone Louise and tell her firmly that she could not attend the wedding. There were, after all, half a dozen genuine reasons she could conjure up for not attending, and one of them was in front of her now on her desk, she acknowledged ruefully, frowning over the preliminary sketches she had been asked to prepare for a large mural to cover the walls of the children’s ward in one of York’s large hospitals.

The commission had come to her via a client of hers, who had spearheaded a campaign to raise funds to support the specialised ward, which had been in danger of collapsing.

An exceedingly large donation from a millionaire local businessman had resulted not only in the ward being fully re-equipped with several vital pieces of advanced technology, but there had also been sufficient money left over for her ex-client, who was chairwoman of the fund-raising committee, to announce briskly that they could afford to do something about the almost institutionalised drabness of the ward’s emulsion-painted walls.

She had approached Jenneth, who had been delighted to accept the commission, which she had offered to do at much less than her normal rates, and in return she had virtually been given carte blanche with the design.

The problem now facing her was what to choose to catch the imagination and attention of children suffering so desperately, and of such very disparate ages.

Her lack of concentration in favour of worrying about the ordeal of Louise’s wedding didn’t help, and she was still frowning over the vague notes she had scribbled down when the studio door opened and Kit came in.

Jenneth watched him walking towards her with the familiar loping stride that both he and his twin had inherited from their father, her heart as always caught up in a wave of mingled love and apprehension…Love because they were both so very dear to her, and apprehension because guiding two exuberant and very high-spirited boys through their teenage years had not always been easy.

Their A levels now behind them, and the long summer holiday just begun, Jenneth realised anew with almost every day that passed that they were now virtually adult. Certainly both of them were emotionally mature and wellbalanced, something for which she modestly refused to take the credit, putting it down to the fact that their parents had provided them all with a stable and loving background during their early years.

Kit grinned at her as he advanced towards her and asked, ‘Any chance of borrowing your car? I’m playing tennis over at Chris Harding’s this afternoon, and Nick’s taken the Metro.’

The rather battered but roadworthy Metro that Jenneth had bought them as a joint eighteenth birthday present had done sterling service in the six months they had owned it, but, although they were twins, her brothers enjoyed different hobbies and had different sets of friends. So far she had ignored the broad hints she had been given about the necessity for another car. The hints had been good-humoured, both boys being well aware that, although their father’s insurance policies had provided a roof over their heads, and a small but steady income, any luxuries had to be paid for out of Jenneth’s commissions.

Since they were both sensible and very good drivers, she had no qualms about loaning them her own car when she wasn’t using it, but on this occasion she shook her head with genuine regret and explained, ‘I have to go in to York with some paintings for the gallery, and I promised Eleanor I’d do it this afternoon. I could drop you off on the way, if you like,’ she offered obligingly.

‘Only if you let me drive,’ Kit countered with a grin. It was a standing joke between them that Jenneth, inclined to daydream, especially when her work engrossed her, was sometimes rather an erratic driver. She blushed even now to recall the occasion on which she had been so deeply involved mentally in the mural she was working on that she had driven down the narrow lane that led from their house to the main road and straight into a ditch, necessitating an anxious call to their nearest neighbour, a local farmer, who obligingly came out with his tractor to haul her sturdy Volvo estate car back on to the lane.

Kit and Nick knew all about Louise’s forthcoming wedding and, although she hadn’t said so to them, both of them were also aware of Jenneth’s reluctance to attend, just as they were both also fully aware of her inner withdrawal whenever the subject of Little Compton and its inhabitants came up.