For Better For Worse

Somewhere within its depths lurked a dozen or more fat lazy goldfish, but Fern suspected they were far too wise and knowing to risk surfacing in such cool weather, and that the young marauder for all his bravura would have a disappointing wait for his dinner.

Through the rhododendron bushes now gone wild and desperately in need of some attention Fern could see the house itself, but today the house wasn’t her destination.

Instead she turned away from it, finding her way through what had once been an attractively planted shrubbery.

Alongside the neglected path there flowered remnants of what must once have been a two- to three-foot-deep ribbon of spring bulbs naturalised in grass.

Today these survived only in broken patches and clumps.

It took Fern almost ten minutes to force her way through the tangled undergrowth obscuring the pathway to the small bowl-shaped enclosure at the centre of the shrubbery.

The stone seat set back from its rim was encrusted with lichen, the lion masks of the seat pedestals and arms badly weathered.

Today, at this time of the year, all that could be seen in the bowl were the emergent shoots of the lilies which when in flower filled the bowl with band after band of massed drifts of flowers in rings of colour from palest cream to deepest gold and from lightest blue to almost purple.

It was Mrs Broughton herself who had first brought her to this spot and told her its history, explaining to her how her husband’s grandmother had had the bowl made and planted, having fallen in love with the same design but on a much grander scale on a visit to America.

The lilies had been in flower then and Fern remembered how the sight of them had made her catch her breath in wonder, tears stinging her eyes, her senses totally overwhelmed by their beauty.

If Nick was right and Adam was part of a consortium planning to buy the house and use the land, this would be the last year she would be able to witness the small miracle of the lilies blossoming.

As she sat down on the stone seat, tears blurred her eyes.

Tears for the destruction of this small oasis of beauty or tears for herself? she wondered cynically as she blinked them away.

‘Fern!’

She tensed, automatically controlling and absorbing her shock, and, even more importantly, concealing it, knowing without having to turn her head to whom the quiet male voice belonged.

Why pretend to be shocked? an inner voice taunted her. You must have known that he might be here. That’s really why you came, isn’t it? Not to mourn the passing of the garden but because…

She got up quickly, her face tight with tension as she turned to face him.

‘Adam!’

Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling; of the unending destructive war within her that was so much a part of her life that the wounds it inflicted on her had long ago ceased consciously to hurt and were something she simply accepted as part of the price she had to pay for her own culpability.

Automatically she retreated into the shadows of the shrubbery, carefully distancing herself from him, protectively concealing her expression, her eyes from him just in case…

‘So Venice was right,’ she said lightly. ‘You are planning to buy this place. What will you build here, Adam? Is it going to be a supermarket as she suggested?’

She could hear the brittle tension in her voice, feel the way her body was starting to tremble as she faced him across the distance which separated them.

It had been almost two years now and yet her senses, her emotions, her flesh could remember with devastating accuracy how it had felt to be held by him, to touch him, not with the knowingness which had come later and for which she must eternally pay the price of her own guilt and searing, suffocating loathing, but with the innocence of loving someone for that first precious and very special time; the wonder of experiencing that love, the joy, the tremulous seesawing between awed delight and disbelief.

He had been so tender with her, so caring… so protective… so careful not to hurry or rush her.

Had he really cared about her at all, or had she simply imagined that he had, out of her own need? Was it merely pity which had motivated him? Whatever he might have felt for her then in that moment of intimacy, she knew what he must feel for her now… how much he must despise her. After all, what man could feel anything other than contempt for a woman who…

Who what? Who went to him and begged him, pleaded with him to make love to her, even after he had already tried to put her to one side, to end what had accidentally and inadvertently begun. Only she hadn’t let him… She had…

She shuddered tensely, desperately trying to block off her self-destructive thoughts, to channel the threatening power of what she was feeling in less lethal directions, to remind herself that she was Nick’s wife.

And the only way she had of reinforcing the view the outside world had to hold of her relationship with Adam, of reinforcing to Adam that he need never ever fear that she would seek to humiliate herself in such a way again, by repeating that idiotic, crazy behaviour of the past, was to treat him with the coldness and distance behind which she had learned to hide her true feelings.

Even when they did not have an audience. After all, it was even more important that Adam did not guess the truth than it was that no one else did.

What was left of her pride, a poor thin-skinned affair, she had somehow managed to patch together, but it could never be wholly mended or trusted, and would certainly never be strong enough to sustain any real blows against it.

‘Is that really what you think I would do, Fern?’

The harshness in his voice hurt her almost physically. She wanted to flinch back from it, to cry out in protest, but stoically she refused to let herself.

Physically Adam might not have that charmed, almost boyish look of youth which made Nick so attractive, but there was something about him in his maturity which appealed even more strongly to her feminine senses now than it had done when they had been younger.

There was a sensuality, a sexuality about Adam which, although covert and subtle rather than something which he himself was aware of and deliberately flaunted, had an effect on her that made her so aware of herself as a woman—aware of herself and aware of her need for him—that just standing here, what should have been a perfectly ludicrously safe distance away from him, was enough to raise the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck and send a frisson of aching desire twisting painfully through her body.

Adam had a masculinity, a maleness which no woman could possibly ignore, she acknowledged tautly. Even now, with her brain and her body screaming warnings of danger to her, she was intensely aware of it and of him.

Aware of it and achingly, desperately envious of the woman, the girl on whom it was bestowed.

Once she had thought she had been that girl, but Nick had questioned her, laughing at her as he asked her almost incredulously if she had really believed that Adam was attracted to her.

‘Has he ever made love to you?’ he had asked her, and she had shaken her head, wincing as Nick had shrugged and announced bluntly, ‘Well, there you are, then. If he had wanted you… really wanted you, he would have done so. I want you, Fern,’ he had added huskily. ‘I want you very, very much.’

She shivered slightly, forcing herself back to the present and to Adam’s question.

‘You’re a businessman,’ she responded tiredly.

‘I’m an architect,’ he contradicted her flatly.

‘But you are here,’ Fern pointed out, flushing slightly as she heard the anger edging up under his voice. ‘Something must have brought you.’

‘You’re here too,’ Adam retaliated coolly. ‘What brought you?’

Somehow Fern managed to swallow down the hard, hurting ball of tears which had locked in her throat. It was always like this when they met, their voices full of painful anger, her body stiff and tense with the effort of rejecting and controlling what she was really feeling, the indifference, the distance she forced herself to display taking so much out of her that she already knew that the moment he had gone she would be reduced to a trembling, shivering wreck, totally unable to do so much as put one foot properly in front of the other; that she would spend hours and not minutes trying to stop herself from reliving the past, from wishing… wanting…

‘You’re here,’ he had said. Tension crawled along her spine and into her nerve-endings. Did he think she had known he would be here… that she had followed him here… that she might… ?

‘I wanted to see the garden, before you destroy it…’

Try as she might, she could not keep the pain out of her voice. She turned to face him, her chin tilting, the sunlight catching her hair so that for a moment she seemed so ethereally a part of her surroundings that Adam found himself holding his breath, afraid almost to breathe as he watched her, mentally reclothing her in soft greens and yellows, the colours, the fabrics flowing and harmonious, enhancing the feminine suppleness of her body, highlighting the almost fawnlike quality of her features, so delicate that they were cruelly swamped by the dullness of the clothes she was actually wearing. Only her hair… Her hair…

Abruptly he looked away from her. She was Nick’s wife and she loved him, although how she…

As she watched him, Fern wondered what he would say if she told him that she had seen the brochure he had been carrying.

Pain flooded through her. It seemed unfairly cruel of fate that it should be Adam of all people who threatened the existence of somewhere that had come to mean so much to her… a solace… a refuge… a sanctuary…