Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN

Five years, to be precise.

      But now wasn’t the time to think of Matt.

      ‘Lucy, I’m home.’

      Giles tensed as he heard the sound of pans being slammed in the kitchen. Increasingly these days he dreaded coming home, dreaded the inevitable row that followed his arrival.

      Ducking his head to avoid the house’s low beams, he walked slowly towards the kitchen. Outside the closed door, he paused, mentally willing away his involuntary mental image of opening the door and finding not Lucy, his wife, waiting there for him, her face sharp with temper, but Davina.

      Davina, who always looked so cool and calm; Davina, whom he had never once heard raise her voice; Davina, who was always so relaxed, so easy to be with, her manner directly the opposite of that of his emotional, highly volatile wife.

      He must stop thinking like this, he told himself fiercely as he took a deep breath and then pushed open the kitchen door.

      Lucy was standing by the sink.

      She was tall and slim, her thick, dark red curls a fiery glow of colour round her small pale face. Her eyes, green and almond-shaped, glittered with temper. Giles could almost see it vibrating through her tense body as she glared at him.

      ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘You were supposed to be back at half-past five.’

      ‘I had to talk to Davina.’

      ‘Oh, you did, did you? And did you tell her that you were leaving? That she wasn’t going to have your broad manly shoulder to cry on for much longer?’

      Giles winced at the bitterness, the acidity in her voice.

      She had gone too far. She could see it from Giles’s face, and for a moment she was afraid. She had thought she had learned to control these rages, these outbursts of temper fuelled by fear and insecurity.

      ‘Well, I hope you’ve had something to eat,’ she told Giles, ‘because there certainly isn’t anything here for you. Half-past five, you said. It’s almost seven.’

      ‘I’m not hungry,’ Giles told her wearily. ‘I’ll make myself a sandwich later.’

      ‘Why bother?’ Lucy goaded him, driven relentlessly towards self-destruction by her fear and anguish. ‘Why not ring Davina and have dinner with her? She’s a wonderful cook … although rumour has it that she wasn’t much good in bed. Still, that won’t bother you, will it, darling? You haven’t had much interest in that department yourself recently, have you? Or is it just me you don’t want?’

      ‘Lucy, please,’ Giles begged her wearily. ‘Not now. I——’

      ‘You what? You don’t want to discuss it. All right, let’s discuss something else, then, shall we? Like your telling Davina that you weren’t going to stay. You did tell her that, didn’t you, Giles?’

      Giles sighed. ‘I … I tried. Look,’ he said desperately when he saw Lucy’s face, ‘it won’t be for much longer. Only another few weeks. She needs me, Lucy.’

      He knew the moment he said it that he had said the wrong thing, but as he watched the way Lucy’s face closed up, her eyes as hard and flat as dull river pebbles, he also knew it was too late to call back his words.

      As Lucy slammed down the pan she had been holding and walked past him he said desperately, ‘Lucy, please try to understand …’

      As she opened the door she turned on him, feral as a maimed cat. ‘I do understand,’ she told him. ‘I understand that Davina James is more important to you than I am.’ As she slammed the door the whole house seemed to shake.

      It was an old house, parts of it dating back to the fourteenth century, a long low-timbered building. They had bought it eight years ago when they first moved here shortly after their marriage.

      They had been so happy then. So much, so passionately in love. When had it all changed? Why?

      He had thought himself so blessed when he met Lucy, bemused by the way she had flirted with him, teased him and coaxed him, dazzled by her fire, by the life, the energy that filled and drove her. She had been a passionate lover, overwhelming all his hesitation, overwhelming him.

      He had been thrilled, disbelieving almost when she had told him she wanted to marry him, shy, hesitant, unsure of him for the first time in their relationship. He had loved her so much then. And he still loved her now. At least, a part of him did; another part of him …

      He tensed as he heard the front door slam and then the sound of her car engine starting up.

      It had been unjust of her to accuse him of not wanting her any more. She had been the one to reject him, to turn away when he reached for her, to let him know without words that his body, his touch no longer aroused her.

      Helplessly Giles sat down, his head in his hands. Maybe for the sake of his marriage he should have stood firm and told Davina that he could not stay on. Maybe he should have done, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t wanted to. The truth was that he had looked at Davina and had ached to take her in his arms, to hold her, to protect her. Davina was that kind of woman. She did not, as Lucy had always done, challenge his masculinity, she complemented it. Where Lucy was all fire and passion, Davina was all loving, comforting serenity, and something within him ached to have that serenity wrapped around him.

      He was so tired. Tired of Lucy’s wild outbursts of temper, her volatility, of all the things about her that had once held him in such thrall. Including her passion? Her love for him?

      Sick at heart, he groaned helplessly to himself.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      ‘I’M SORRY, Saul, but I’d forgotten when we arranged for you to have the children this weekend that we were going to stay with the Holmeses. Tom adores it down there. He and Charles Holmes are such good friends——’

      ‘And Josey?’ Saul interrupted his ex-wife grimly. ‘Does she adore it too?’

      It was pointless losing his temper with Karen. He knew that, but he could feel the emotion surging through him, battering down his self-control, demanding an outlet. What was happening to him? He had always been so sure of his self-control, of his ability to hide his real emotions, especially when they were unwanted ones.

      ‘Saul, please. Don’t be difficult about this. Josey’s got her own friends. Her own life. She’s growing up.’

      And the last thing she wanted to do was to spend time with him, Saul recognised as he heard Karen out in acid silence. It was hard to remember now that they had once been married, that they had once shared all the intimacies of a married relationship, and sometimes it was even harder to recall why they had married, to recall the emotions he had once felt.

      He was drained of those emotions now, incapable almost of experiencing them, even in retrospect. Increasingly he felt as though he had somehow lost pace with the rest of the human race, as though he was isolated from it, living in a void, a vacuum, where nothing existed other than his own unfamiliar, terrifying doubts.

      ‘Why don’t we arrange for them to come to you next weekend?’ Karen was saying.

      ‘I’m afraid next weekend is out,’ Saul told her. ‘I’m leaving for Cheshire next week.’

      ‘You’re going to see Christie?’

      He could hear the astonishment in Karen’s voice and just in time stopped himself from correcting her and telling her that he was going to Cheshire on business.

      His body suddenly felt cold with shock at the thought of how easily he might have made such a self-betraying mistake. It showed how much his concentration was slipping … his control. The purpose of his visit to Cheshire was supposed to be confidential—not that Karen was likely to realise its significance