Second-Best Husband

She had honestly believed that Margaret was the only person who knew how she felt, and only because, the year after Sara had moved in next door to her, Margaret had come round unexpectedly one evening and found her in tears because Ian had cancelled the evening out he had arranged for the two of them, as their ‘Christmas party’ and a thank-you to her for all her hard work during the year, so that he could go instead to a party with his latest girlfriend.

Not even her parents or her sister knew…or at least she assumed they didn’t, and she wondered miserably now if even they had guessed, and had kept silent out of pity and compassion for her.

She was fully deserving of the contempt Anna had poured on her, she reflected bitterly now. She was, after all, that most ridiculous of stereotyped creatures, the dull, plain woman, desperately in love with her charming, handsome boss… But at least now she had broken out of that mould by handing in her notice.

‘Well, if you want my advice, you’re well out of it,’ Margaret told her roundly, adding equally forthrightly, ‘All right, I know you hate anyone criticising Ian, but for once I’m going to say what I think, and that is that he’s used you, used your talents, your skills, and now—’

‘And now that he’s fallen in love with Anna there isn’t any room in his life for me any more,’ Sara interrupted her quietly. ‘And to think that all this time I honestly believed I’d successfully hidden how I felt. At first, when I got that job with him…well, I was only nineteen, my head stuffed with dreams.’ She was talking more to herself than to her friend.

‘I’d come to London from Shropshire because I wanted to improve my skills, my chances of getting a top-class job. My parents were concerned about my leaving home, but they didn’t try to stop me. At first I was thoroughly miserable…thoroughly homesick. I was sharing a place with three other girls, working as a temp during the day, and going to college at night to improve my computer and language skills, and then I met Ian. He was taking the same computer course. He was twenty-five then, and he had just broken away and set up his own business. He was a salesman really, he told me, and what he really needed desperately was someone to run the office for him. Eventually he offered me the job, and I jumped at it. He was always a generous boss financially…and then, when Gran died, I used the money I inherited from her to buy this place. I wasn’t homesick anymore…I’d made friends, made a life here for myself, and, if I couldn’t bear to admit it to anyone else, I had already admitted to myself that it was my love for Ian as much as the challenge of my job that kept me working for him. Like a fool, I never gave up hoping…’

And he allowed you to have that hope, Margaret thought shrewdly, but didn’t say so. She felt that Sara had endured more than enough already without having any more burdens to carry.

‘So what will you do now?’ she asked gently.

‘Go home,’ Sara told her, smiling wryly when she saw Margaret’s expression.

‘Yes, silly, isn’t it? I’m a grown woman of twenty-nine, who’s lived in London for ten years, and yet for some reason I still think of Shropshire as home. I’ve got quite a bit saved…I can let this place if necessary…I can afford to take a few months off, give myself time…’ She shook her head uncomfortably, aware that one of the reasons she was so intent on leaving London was because she was afraid—afraid that, once her initial shock and the anger that went with it had gone, she would become vulnerably weak…that she would find excuses for getting in touch with Ian—small matters outstanding at the office…small facts which only she knew—and she didn’t want to allow herself to degenerate into that kind of helpless self-destructiveness. Things were bad enough as it was, without her making them worse…without her knowingly allowing herself to hang on to the coat-tails of Ian’s life, pathetic and unwanted, an object of derision and contempt.

She closed her eyes as her vision became blurred by tears, obliterating the mental image she had just had of Ian and Anna together, laughing about her, Ian’s handsome blond head flung back, his blue eyes laughing, his expression one of callous contempt. She shivered suddenly, acknowledging how odd it was that she was able to conjure up that image so easily; and yet, had anyone ever suggested to her that Ian could be callous, could be cruel, could be deliberately malicious and unkind, she would have refuted their criticisms immediately. Except…over the years there had been occasions, moments, when even her devotion had wavered, flinching a little as he made a decision, a comment, a pronouncement which she had soft-heartedly felt to be less warm and generous than it should have been.

She had known always that he was egotistical, but she had allowed herself to believe it was the egotism of a spoiled little boy who didn’t know any better, who would never deliberately inflict cruelty on others. Had she been wrong? Had she all this time refused to allow herself to see the truth? She shivered again, causing Margaret to watch her with some concern.

Despite Sara’s outward air of competence and self-containment, her neighbour had always privately thought that these only narrowly masked an inner vulnerability and fragility, a soft femininity which made Margaret despise Ian Saunders even more for his lack of concern and compassion for her friend.

‘Yes, I think you should go home,’ she said firmly now. ‘Even though I know I’m going to miss you desperately, especially when I’m looking for someone to look after those two awful brats of mine.’

Sara laughed shakily. ‘You know you adore them,’ she countered.

‘Mmm…but I try not to let them guess it. It’s hard work at times being the only woman in a household of three males.’ She paused and then said quietly, ‘I know this probably isn’t the time to raise this particular subject, but I’m going to say something to you that I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I’m older than you, Sara, and I’ve seen a lot more of life. I know how you feel about Ian Saunders, or at least how you think you feel, but in all honesty you’ve never allowed yourself to discover whether you could allow yourself to love or care for any other man, have you?’ she asked gently.

‘Allow myself—’ Sara began, but Margaret refused to let her speak.

‘Falling in love is easy, loving someone is a lot harder; and going on loving them, through the nitty-gritty of mundane everyday life, is even harder, and even more worthwhile.

‘I know from the things you’ve told me, from watching you with my own two, that you want children. You know what you should do now, don’t you? You should put Ian Saunders right out of your mind and look round for a nice man to marry and have those children with.’

Sara couldn’t help it. She flushed defensively. ‘I can’t switch off my feelings just like that, marry a man I don’t love, no matter how much I might want a family.’

Of course Margaret was right. Of course she wanted children. Sometimes, in fact, that wanting was so sharp, so acutely painful that it made her ache inside, made her wake up at night…but what Margaret was telling her to do was impossible.

‘I wasn’t in love with Ben when I married him,’ Margaret told her softly, astounding Sara. She had never met anyone apart from her own parents who were as devoted and as obviously content and happy together as their neighbours, and she had always assumed that they had been deeply in love when they married. ‘And, what’s more, he wasn’t in love with me. In fact, we were both on the rebound from other relationships. We’d known each other some time in a casual, friendly sort of way. One evening we got talking…we discovered how many interests we had in common, including a desire to settle down and raise a family, and that those needs had not been shared by our previous partners, the ones with whom we were so much in love. So we talked about it, started going out together, to see if it…if we could work, and then, when we found that we were getting on as well together as we had hoped, we got married. Not because we were in love, but because we both genuinely and honestly thought we could make our relationship work. I’ve never for one minute regretted that decision, and I don’t think Ben has either—and do you know something else?’ She gave Sara a shining, almost defensive smile. ‘I don’t know quite how it has happened, but somehow there’s been a small miracle for both of us, and now we love one another very much indeed.’

‘I envy you, Margaret, but I don’t think…’

‘Listen to me. You and I are very much alike in many ways. Stop wasting your life on a man who you can’t have and who would hurt you badly if you could. Don’t spend the rest of your life weeping tears of regret. Decide what it is you really want. Use this time with your parents at home to think about the things which are really important to you. All right, so you may decide that I’m wrong, that a husband, a home, a family aren’t the things you want enough to put aside your dreams of falling in love, of being in love for. But on the other hand you might find you make some surprising discoveries about yourself and about your true needs.’

As Sara turned off the motorway and took the familiar route homewards, she found herself turning over in her mind what Margaret had said to her. A home…children… Yes, these were things she had always wanted. Despite her decision to move to London, to carve a life for herself as a career woman in the big city, at heart she had remained the small-town girl she had been born. She had enjoyed her years in London, but in her heart of hearts she had never believed they would be anything other than a busy interlude between her childhood and her eventual role as a wife and mother.

Every time she saw her parents, every time she saw her sister, she was reminded of her most basic needs and how her life was stifling them. How it was stifling her. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to break away from Ian… She had refused to make herself face up to the truth: that there never was going to come a day when he would turn to her, look at her…take her in his arms. She was twenty-nine years old. Not old by any means, but no longer young enough to deceive herself with such silly daydreams. She thought of the men who had asked her out over the years, kind, pleasant men, but just men when compared with Ian, with her love, her adoration…her compulsive worship of him. Men whom she had refused, ignored, forgotten… Men with whom, according to Margaret, she could easily have been happy and fulfilled…men with whom she could have had children. Children who would have given her so much joy—children who would have made her forget Ian? Impossible, surely…or was it simply that she did not want to allow herself to forget him; that she was so conscious of the fact that she had wasted so much of her life, given up so much, to maintain her devotion to him, that her pride, her stubbornness, would not allow her to admit that she had made a mistake, had behaved in a stupid blinkered fashion? But now that she was being forced into separating her life from his…now that she…

She moved restlessly in her seat. Her back was beginning to ache from the long drive. She was glad that it was almost summer and the evenings light enough to allow her to complete her journey before it grew dark.

Her expression softened into one of warm affection as she thought about her parents. Her father was retired now. He and her mother still lived in the house where she and her sister had grown up, though. Two miles outside the village, it stood alone, halfway down a lane which led eventually to the Jacobean manor house whose home farm it had once been.

The manor house had been empty for several years, the old man who had owned it having died and there being no direct heir, nor apparently anyone interested in purchasing such a rambling and derelict property so far off the beaten track. But when she had last been home at Christmas—Ian had booked a skiing holiday in Colorado for Christmas and the New Year, and so there had been nothing to tempt her to stay in London, even if she could have brought herself to disappoint her parents and break with family tradition by doing so—her mother had told her excitedly that the house had at last been sold. The man who had bought it was some sort of tree expert with the Forestry Commission who had now decided to branch out into a business of his own, growing and selling not only rare specimen trees, but also many native broadleaved trees, for which apparently there was a growing market both at home and abroad in these environmentally aware days.

Her parents had only met their new neighbour briefly, but Sara had gained the impression that her mother had rather taken him to her heart.

‘All on his own living in that great draughty place,’ was what she had said at Christmas, adding that she had invited him to join them for Christmas Day, but that he had apparently already made arrangements to spend the holiday with friends in the north-east of the country.

‘He’s not married, and has no family to speak of. Both his parents are dead, and his brother lives in Australia.’

How like her mother to wheedle so much information out of a stranger so very quickly, Sara reflected fondly. Not out of nosiness; her mother wasn’t like that. She was one of those people who was naturally concerned for and caring about her fellow man.

What would she have made of Ian had Sara ever taken him home? It came to her with a small unpleasant jolt of surprise that she knew without even having to consider the matter that her parents would not have taken to Ian; that he in turn would have treated them with that slightly disdainful contempt she had seen him use to such effect with anyone he considered neither important enough nor interesting enough to merit his attention.

She bit her lip, worrying at it without realising what she was doing.

But Ian wasn’t really like that. He was fun, clever, quick-witted…not…not shallow, vain and self-important. Or was he? Had she in her love for him been guilty of wearing rose-coloured glasses, of seeing in him the qualities she wanted to see and ignoring those which reflected less well on him, which actually existed?

If he was really the man she had wanted to believe he was, had allowed herself to believe he was, would he have been attracted to a woman like Anna, outwardly attractive in an obvious and rather overdone sort of way, but inwardly…?

Sara bit her lip again. She had no right to criticise Anna just because she… No doubt Ian saw a side of her that wasn’t discernible to her, another woman…a woman moreover who loved him. Jealousy wasn’t an attractive emotion, and she was hardly an impartial critic, she reminded herself sternly. And, anyway, what did it matter what she thought of Anna? Ian loved her. He had told her so himself.

Her body tensed as she remembered that awful day. A Monday morning. Ian had been away for the weekend to stay with ‘friends’. To stay with Anna, she had realised later. He had arrived halfway through the morning glowing with enthusiasm and excitement.

It had happened at last, he had told Sara exuberantly. He had at last met the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life…a woman like no other…

She remembered how she had listened, sick at heart, her body still as she forbade it to reveal the anguish she was suffering, her face averted from him as she fought to control her shock, her pain.

And then, when she had actually met Anna for the first time, she had realised what a fool she had been to ever imagine that Ian might come to love her. She and Anna were so completely different from one another. She was tall and slim, thin almost; Anna was shorter, and all voluptuous curves. She was shy, withdrawn almost, quiet and rather reserved; Anna was a self-publicist with no inhibitions about singing her own praises, advancing her own talents.

Where she preferred restraint, quiet clothes in classic colours and styles, Anna wore the kind of expensive designer outfits calculated to draw people’s attention.

Watching the way Ian looked at her, seeing the desire, the admiration in his eyes as he followed Anna’s every movement, Sara had recognised how truly foolish she had been in ever allowing herself to hope that there might come a day when Ian would turn to her, would look at her.

She was simply not his type. Oh, he might like her…he might praise her work, he might even flatter her as he had done over the years…and she might have been silly enough to use that flattery to build herself a tower of hope that any sensible woman would soon have realised had no foundation at all; but the reality was that, whether Anna had arrived in his life or not, Ian would never have found her, Sara, desirable.

Face it, she derided herself bitterly now. You just aren’t the kind of woman that men do desire.

She remembered how often her sister had teased her about her aloofness, had told her that she ought to relax more, have fun… ‘You always look so prim and proper,’ Jacqui had told her. ‘So neat and perfect that no man would ever dare to ruffle your hair or smudge your lipstick.’

She had wanted to protest then that that wasn’t true, but had been too hurt to do so. It wasn’t her fault if she wasn’t the curly, pretty, vivacious type.

She cringed inwardly, remembering how Anna had mocked her, telling her, ‘Honestly, you’re unbelievable. Quite the archetypal frustrated spinster type, dotingly in love with a man she can never have. I suppose you’re still even a virgin. Ian thinks it’s a huge joke, a woman of your age who hasn’t had a lover; but then, as he said, what red-blooded man would want you?’

Anna had smiled a cruel little smile as she casually threw these comments to her, malice glinting in her light blue eyes as they focused on Sara’s pale, set face.