Past Loving. Penny Jordan

exercise which had now left her feeling uncomfortably at odds with herself, unfamiliar and sometimes very out of charity with the woman she saw in the mirror, a woman who had swapped her jeans for designer suits, a woman who no longer went bare-legged but who wore silk stockings, a woman whose silky fine hair had been skilfully cut and even more skilfully highlighted so that it fell in a soft blonde sheeny bob that emphasised the delicate purity of her skin and bone-structure…but most of all a woman who she was suddenly recognising had become a woman, and was no longer a girl.

      She was thirty now…where on earth had the years gone? When she looked back to her late teens her life had worked out so differently from what she had imagined. Then she had expected and believed that she would marry, would have children, would be content and absorbed by the fulfilment of being the axis on which her husband’s and her children’s lives turned, just as her own mother had been, and yet here she was at thirty, not married, not a mother, but with the kind of high profile and successful career which she had so strenuously denied at eighteen was what she wanted. But then at eighteen she had believed herself to be in love; and what was more she had believed that that love was returned and that it was forever. How naïve she had been. These days, when she looked around at her friends’marriages and relationships, she was forced to realise just how idealistic her teenage dreams had been. Paul, her brother, was always complaining that she was too much of a daydreamer.

      Paul. He was away in South America at the moment, gathering as much research material as he could from the tribes of the rain forests before their environment and the potentially irreplaceable properties of the things that grew there were lost forever, plants that could produce lifesaving drugs, without the side-effects of synthetic products.

      She moved restlessly on Patsy’s chintz-covered settee, suddenly overwhelmed by the heavy scent of Patsy’s perfume, the cloying over-stuffed prettiness of her carefully designed sitting-room. She ached to be outside in the fresh air, to be dressed in her oldest jeans, turning over spades full of soft loamy earth, feeling the excitement and pleasure of siting the bulbs, of allowing her imagination to paint for her the colourful picture they would make in the spring, in their uniform beds set among lawn pathways and bordered by a long deep border of old-fashioned perennial plants. The kitchen window overlooked those beds, and beyond them on the other side of the wall lay her herb and vegetable garden.

      Robert had always teased her about her fascination with growing things, claiming that it must be a throwback…a resurgence of those genes which had led to her father’s family producing generation after generation of farmers.

      In her grandparents’ day, though, farming had not been profitable enough to support a family and so the farm had been sold and her own father had qualified as an accountant, even though he had never been drawn to city life and had remained living in the village where he had been brought up.

      Her brother had none of the need for roots and continuity that so motivated her; he was a traveller, a restless adventurer whose quicksilver brain never allowed him to rest. No wonder he and Robert had been such good friends. Had been…Holly wondered if they were still in touch. Paul certainly never mentioned him much these days—or at least he hadn’t mentioned him until recently…until his name and his photograph had begun to feature so prominently on the pages of the financial Press.

      She could feel her muscles starting to tense, her mind and body preparing to reject the mental image she could feel trying to threaten her peace of mind. In vain she tried frantically to concentrate on the soothing mental spectacle of the frothy mass of deep blue forget-me-nots and the tall elegant blooms of golden yellow tulips, but instead, traitorously, the only image her brain cells would produce was one of a lithe dark-haired man, the image in her own memory-banks subtly altered to allow for the passage of time, so that the hardness of his bone-structure was more apparent, and the cool clarity of his blue-grey eyes reinforced by time and experience.

      Robert had always known what he wanted from life, had always known where he was going; the pity of it was that she had misguidedly believed that she was a part of that life plan; that when he told her he loved her, he meant he would always love her.

      Memories she didn’t want to acknowledge started to surface: emotions, needs, feelings she had told herself over ten years ago that she had to suppress and destroy.

      How many girls of eighteen or thereabouts suffered what she had suffered and walked away from that suffering without a backward glance? Why was it that she had never been able to say truthfully to herself that she was over Robert, that the memory of him no longer caused her the slightest surge of pain?

      She had been careful with her relationships since then, careful to admit into her life men whom she knew could never threaten her emotional barriers, men whom she liked, whose company she enjoyed, men whom she knew would have liked to take their relationship a step further from that of good friends to that of lovers, men who in many cases and with only the slightest encouragement could easily have fallen in love with her and wanted to spend their life with her, but she had been too afraid to allow that…afraid of making the wrong judgement…afraid of allowing herself to love again, only to be rejected again. And what, after all, was she missing out on? Not the idealistic union of two people who were all in all to one another, lovers, friends, companions, mutually loving and supportive, intensely loyal, sufficient only to themselves, as she had imagined that marriage would be when she was in love with Robert.

      No, when she looked at her friends’ marriages, none of them was like that, although in the main most of them worked…after a fashion.

      She knew so many women who said openly that their relationships with their husbands came a poor second to their love for their children and that it was that love that cemented their marriages together; and she also knew many men who claimed over business lunches and to her irritation and annoyance that their wives no longer cared for them, no longer put them first, no longer treated them with the adoration and worship they believed they deserved. And yet somehow or other their marriages kept going.

      Perhaps the fault was hers in that she as an outsider looking in saw the flaws…or perhaps it was simply her mind’s defence mechanism, a way of comforting her and of telling her that she was better off the way she was…better off staying single rather than risking the precarious waters of marriage, rather than allowing herself to risk the pain that went with love.

      No, nothing in her life had worked out as she had planned. She glanced across at Patsy, who was still complaining about Gerald, her face twisted into prematurely aging lines of bitterness and irritation. Patsy, who during their teens had been the one who had said challengingly and determinedly that she was going to make something of her life, that she wasn’t going to stay mouldering away in the country when there was all the excitement of the city waiting for anyone with the enterprise and will-power to take up that challenge.

      And so what had Patsy done? She had taken herself off to London, and got herself a job working at a gallery off Bond Street, where she had promptly and foolishly had an affair with the owner, which had resulted in her summary dismissal when her boss’s wife had found out, plus an unscheduled and very unpleasant visit to a private abortion clinic.

      Patsy had told her all this in a tearful and wine-induced confession on the eve of her marriage to Gerald. Gerald, the childhood sweetheart she had come home to marry, when the glitter of city life had begun to pall. Gerald, who in Patsy’s estimation was her consolation prize in life for failing to win something more enticing in its lottery.

      And yet here was Pasty complaining that she thought that Gerald might be being unfaithful to her.

      Automatically Holly started to reassure her, only to be interrupted when Patsy struck out venomously, ‘Well, of course you would say that. Honestly, Holly, you’ve always got your head in the clouds. You never see reality. It’s no wonder that you’re still unmarried—which reminds me…Guess who’s bought the Hall?’

      Holly waited, her face calm and she hoped expressionless. She knew what was coming and had known it all weekend, in fact, since Rory, arriving with a load of manure for the roses, had casually announced that the Hall had been sold and guess who had bought it? He, of course, was a decade younger than her, far too young to have known, even less remembered