For The Babies' Sakes

But… Female knickers on the stairs. Her husband home. Curtains drawn. It all seemed horribly damning.

A scouring fear washed through her and she felt her legs begin to shake uncontrollably. With a trembling hand she pushed back her hair, smoothing its muddy strands back till it stopped dripping down her face and blurring her vision. She had to investigate.

Hardly aware she was still wearing her muddy boots, she stumbled over to the foot of the stairs and grabbed blindly at the newel post to prevent herself from sinking to the floor in a boneless heap.

Tears dammed up in her throat, choking her. She felt so shocked and weak that she could hardly collect her thoughts to make sense of what was happening.

But she knew there must be a rational explanation. He wouldn’t betray her, not Dan. She racked her brains desperately.

Perhaps he was ill. And some time before he’d felt really sick and had come home, he’d bought some sexy underwear to spice up their non-existent sex life, and had accidentally dropped something from his shopping foray as he’d staggered up the stairs to bed.

Her brain stalled, her headache intensifying, and she waited for a moment of dizziness to pass. Illness was so debilitating. She had crawled back from London after nearly fainting on the way to work. The trip had been draining: a long walk, two tubes, an hour’s journey on the train and a twenty-minute drive.

Normally she was out all day. Dan would expect her to be furthering her career as the financial executive for the ‘Top People’s Store’ in fashionable Knightsbridge. But she’d come home instead.

And she wished with all her heart that she hadn’t because the doubts were building up, terrifying her with the possibility that Dan could be upstairs in their bedroom with another woman.

Her head lifted in despair and, to her horror, she suddenly noticed something else, a few steps further up. It was a nylon stocking in a very fine denier, its twin casually twined around the banister.

‘Oh, Dan!’ she breathed, tragic-faced, desperately hoping against hope that there was some simple, obvious answer to this. ‘Don’t be there,’ she pleaded. ‘I couldn’t bear it!’

He was everything to her. She had even agreed to live in this awful house, with its wall-to-wall mud outside and an attic full of crazy squirrels who thundered about all night in clogs. She’d even tried to ignore the spiders who leered at her from every conceivable corner of the house and who waggled their spindly legs at her in a horribly menacing way. Anything, she’d thought, if it made him happy.

And they’d been happy, hadn’t they? He’d pledged un-dying love, had carried her over the threshold of the huge, thatched Deep Dene farmhouse after their marriage two years ago and had proudly pointed out its wonderful potential when all she could see was dereliction and isolation.

But for him she’d put up with the dilapidation, the constant presence of the builders, the temperamental boiler and scowling Aga stove.

City-bred, she had longed for decent pavements, traffic-filled tarmac and frequent inhalations of carbon monoxide. But Dan adored Deep Dene with its ancient beams, inglenook fires and five acres of landscaped gardens, so she had curbed her horror.

They had handed the place over to the workmen and had begun their hectic commuting to London from their future Dream Home in the Sussex Downs. Though it was more of a nightmare to her.

Her stomach churned as she stared blankly into space. Perhaps the commuting was the problem. They hardly saw one another nowadays. It was ages since they’d hugged, and weeks and weeks since they’d made love. She got home late and flung something in the microwave. Dan turned up at all hours, sometimes too shattered to speak.

Her face paled. He was too virile, too intensely masculine to be celibate.

That was when men strayed.

‘Dan! Don’t do this to me!’ she whispered, appalled.

The awful feeling in her stomach became unbearable, though whether that was due to her illness or to fear of what she might find, she didn’t know.

Tentatively she lifted a booted foot, vaguely registering that it was thick with clay goo, and put it on the first step of the stairs. As she did so her hair swung forwards in a silky black arc. When she returned it to its proper place behind her ears, she found that perspiration was standing out in beads on her skin. She was sicker than she’d realised.

And then she heard voices. They were faint and distant, drifting down from the master bedroom. But immediately her pathetic theory of Dan’s saucy shopping spree was demolished because she clearly identified his firm, low tones and then the lighter purr from an unknown woman.

Her shocked eyes silvered with pain. ‘No! No!’ she denied futilely under her breath.

There was a strange woman in her house. Upstairs. Without knickers. With her husband. She swallowed hard. It didn’t need a genius to work out the scenario.

Something wrenched inside her, an inner agony that ripped into her heart and sucked away her very breath. She stood there, paralysed with shock, while her head grew dizzy from the manic activity of the horrid little voices, which were whispering in her brain and gleefully suggesting what was going on up there.

She couldn’t bear it. She loved him. Trusted him implicitly. It wasn’t true. There must be some mistake. Had to be.

Perhaps, she thought wildly, there was an alternative to solving the mystery. The coward’s way. She could just turn around. Slip out silently. Get into the car and make a lot of noise pretending to arrive. Then she could make believe that this had never happened.

In a stew of indecision she considered this. Pictured herself being fussed over by Dan and the mysterious woman as they fobbed her off with stories of an impromptu business meeting—or maybe pretended the planning of a surprise birthday party…

And then she imagined the questions screaming inside her, for ever silenced by her fear of facing the truth.

No, she couldn’t live with herself—or Dan—unless she knew whether he had been unfaithful. If he was cheating on her—in her own house, her own bedroom!—she must know.

Of course she had no choice but to go up. She was being a wimp. Helen sucked in a huge, rasping breath and eyed the stairs with dread, wishing she could come up with an innocent explanation. Her lower lip trembled. Nothing came to mind. Unless the woman was an interior designer or a fabric expert, who’d, who’d…drawn the curtains to…

Aware that she was floundering, Helen stuffed a fist to her mouth to stop a cry of despair. What about the briefs? The stockings? Who, or why, would anyone drop those? And…now she was peering around the curve of the stairs she could see that there were other…things further up, things she hastily averted her gaze from in case they might add up to a confirmation of Dan’s infidelity.

Surely he wouldn’t! she thought desperately. He loved her. Correction. Had loved her. She flushed, the heat flooding through her limp body. How long was it since they’d had time to be loving or even affectionate? Too long. They’d been leading separate lives.

Guilt crawled through every cell she possessed. She’d been too busy, too tired… Her eyes narrowed. It took two to tango. He too had pleaded tiredness! Tired from what? a nasty little voice asked and she bit her lip hard.

He’d always crawled in from work exhausted. It was like being married to the Invisible Man. Some days the nearest she got to him in waking hours was ironing his shirts. He wore two a day—sometimes three. After he’d burned two of them with the iron one morning, during his hectic scramble to catch the six-thirty to Victoria, she’d taken over the chore. But now she wondered if she’d merely been smartening him up for his mistress.

A wave of sickness took her by surprise, roaring its way through her. For a moment she remained motionless, waiting till the flush of heat had gone. And then she forced herself to confront Dan even though she dreaded what she’d find.

But her long legs simply refused to take another step. Sinking to her knees, she virtually dragged herself up, avoiding more than a cursory, horrified glance at a pair of discarded shoes which were bright cerise and glove-soft with courtesan heels. Tart’s shoes, she thought with unaccustomed viciousness.

A little further on, she encountered a sickly pink bra and suspender belt with a matching silk T-shirt. Beyond, she could see an abandoned navy suit, the skirt and jacket arranged almost artistically on the top step.

Her throat dried. All hope of an innocent explanation lay dead in the water. She dug her teeth into her lip till she felt the pain. Somehow she kept going, each step a mountain to climb as it brought her closer to the terrifying truth. She’d always been determined. And never more so than now.

Somewhere in the background she was aware that Dan and the woman were still talking but she couldn’t hear them properly because the blood was roaring so loudly in her ears. They could have been murmuring sweet nothings or discussing curtains to match the pink knickers for all she knew.

Her stomach plummeted like a lift. I love you, Dan! I love you! she screamed silently to herself. Don’t do this to me!

And she prayed for this to be a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by flu, that she’d wake up and later she’d tell Dan and they’d laugh and he’d sweep her into his arms and say that he’d never look at another woman because he loved her so much and he hadn’t minded not having sex or decent suppers and that he’d neglected her shamefully…

Oh, God. She’d arrived. The top of the stairs. Still on her hands and knees, she found to her dismay that she was weeping and gasping uncontrollably.

And that she was staring straight at a naked pair of female legs.

CHAPTER TWO

THEY were very shapely, she noted hazily. With scarlet toenails. Helen’s world spun around on its axis. She daredn’t look any higher. She wasn’t ready to be confronted by the full horror of her husband’s nude paramour.

‘Good grief! Helen!’ exclaimed the owner of the legs. ‘What have you got on your feet?’

Celine’s laugh seared through her. Celine, Helen thought dumbly, her gaze fixated on the blood-red toes that seemed to be curling possessively into the landing carpet as if claiming ownership of the house as well as her husband.

This was Dan’s PA. His right-hand woman. Angrily she amended that. Include her left hand in that description, too! And both legs, torso, boobs…all of Celine was apparently part of Dan’s domain! And the woman wasn’t even embarrassed!