Lingering Shadows

And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.

His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.

But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.

The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.

Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.

When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’

She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.

‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’

Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.

She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.

To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.

When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.

He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.

She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.

‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.

The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’

It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.

She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.

Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.

While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.

After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.

It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.

Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.

And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.

It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.

Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.

When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.

Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.

They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.

Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.

‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’

She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.

And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.

She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.

She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.

Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.

She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.

The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.

Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.

She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.

She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.

She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.

She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.

The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.

A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.

The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.

The solicitor’s wife was a couple of years younger than Lucy but looked older. She had three young children, around whom her entire life revolved.

‘Has the baby kicked yet?’ she asked Lucy over dinner. ‘I remember the first time John did … I couldn’t wait to tell Alistair. We spent all evening with me with my turn exposed and Alistair’s hand on it just so that he wouldn’t miss it if it happened again. And it was the middle of winter.’

Lucy’s hand shook as she tried to eat her food. Giles couldn’t bear to look at her now, never mind touch her, or at least that was how it seemed.

When Lucy was just over six months pregnant she went into premature labour. Giles was away on business for Carey’s and so there was no one to accompany her when the ambulance screamed to a halt outside the house, summoned by the alert doctor’s receptionist’s response to her frightened telephone call.