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‘My tummy hurts,’ he complained. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to school. Why can’t I stay at home with you?’
‘Because I have to go out to work,’ Tara told him firmly, surreptitiously checking his pulse and temperature. Both seemed normal. Simon’s pain was more imaginary than real, she suspected, and sympathised with him, remembering how often she had suffered similar afflictions.
‘Are we going to stay with that lady for the weekend?’ Mandy demanded as Tara bustled them outside to the Mini. ‘Where does she live?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tara was forced to admit. ‘In the country somewhere.’
‘The country?’ Simon perked up immediately. ‘On a farm?’ he breathed hopefully.
Although it was ridiculously early to be worrying about careers for the twins, Simon’s very evident love of the countryside and its inhabitants led Tara to believe that he would be happiest in some sort of outdoor life connected with farming.
‘Not a farm, I don’t think,’ Tara told him.
‘But we can go, can’t we?’ Mandy pleaded. ‘We never go anywhere. Everyone else in our class is always going away.’
Allowing for childish exaggeration, Tara knew the criticism was well founded. The twins’ school fees meant that there was very little money left over for luxuries such as holidays, although they did spend weekends with her mother and aunt and uncle occasionally. These visits were not always a great success; her mother had never been able to fully conceal her disapproval of the twins’ birth, and all the time they were in her company Tara was on tenterhooks in case her mother made some unguarded reference to James.
As disapproving as she had been of Tara herself, it was for James that she had reserved a bitter, intense hatred which had not waned with the years.
And yet in many ways she was more to blame than James, Tara reflected tiredly. By the time she had realised the true nature of her feelings for him it had been too late for her to turn back. Susan’s mother was rarely at home; she had a partnership in a business in New York and spent much of her time there, and Tara with adolescent logic, fathoms deep in love, had somehow managed to dismiss her almost entirely from her mind, not attempting to hide her love for James.
With the added wisdom the intervening years had brought Tara could see things more objectively from James’ point of view; married to a woman several years his elder, a woman who spent most of her time away from home leaving him alone, a taxing, struggle business to run—was it so very surprising that he had given in to the impulse to take the solace she had so innocently offered?
Perhaps not, but surely he must have known so much better than she had that there was no future for them? Surely he should have had the sophistication and worldly wisdom to call a halt before matters finally got out of hand? That was what she could not forgive him—that he had carelessly disregarded the consequences of allowing a mixture of boredom and sexual desire to overcome the barriers which should have existed between them.
She had been seventeen to his twenty-six—not a vast difference in terms of years, but in terms of experience…
‘Mummy, we’re here!’ Mandy announced shrilly, drawing her attention to the fact that she had been about to drive past the school.
After leaving the twins Tara drove straight to the studio. The moment she walked in she sensed that Chas was in one of his difficult moods. He grunted without looking up from the camera he was engrossed in. A model Tara recognised from previous sessions was sitting tensely on a bentwood chair, the atmosphere in the hot studio thick with tension.
Summing up the situation at a glance, Tara shrugged out of her coat and filled the kettle in the small kitchen attached to the studio. Without saying a word she placed a mug of coffee in front of Chas and went across to chat to the model. She was nineteen, with several successful ad campaigns behind her, and Tara knew from the schedules that she had come in to sit for some practice shots for a Vogue feature.
‘Is he always like this?’ she asked Tara in an agonised whisper. ‘I remember last time I came here…’
‘It’s just his way,’ Tara soothed her. ‘He’s an artist with the camera and a perfectionist.’
The other girl grimaced. ‘It’s at times like these that I wish I’d done as my parents wanted me to and gone on to university!’
Chas’s brusque, ‘If you two have quite finished on the girl talk, perhaps we can get some work done,’ put an end to their conversation.
It was lunchtime before Tara even had time to draw breath. Chas was in the kind of mood where he seemed almost driven, and it was both mentally and physically exhausting trying to keep pace with him.
At two o’clock Chas finally announced irritably that he supposed they ought to break for lunch, and Tara went thankfully to buy them some sandwiches before he changed his mind. It wasn’t unusual for him to insist on working right through the day without stopping, and the hungry grumbling of her stomach had been distracting her attention for almost an hour.
When she got back to the studio the model had gone and the phone was ringing. The ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the darkroom door meant exactly what it said, as she knew from experience, and reaching for the phone she dumped her sandwiches on the table.
The crisp, cool tones of the twins’ headmistress sent tremors of fear jangling along her nerves.
‘The twins—’ she began urgently, but Mrs Ledbetter was obviously used to dealing with anxious parents, because she said soothingly, ‘Nothing to worry about, Mrs Bellamy, it’s just that Simon has been complaining of stomach ache all morning. Our Matron has checked him over and we can’t find anything wrong. He probably just wants a bit of coddling.’
A thin flush of colour ran up under Tara’s fine skin as she tried to dissect the calming words to discover if they held an implied rebuke. One of her greatest burdens in bringing up the twins alone was that she couldn’t be at home with them. She had never tried to contact James after that first time when Susan’s mother had laughed in her face at her naïveté, and there was no one to support the twins apart from herself, so work was a basic necessity. But that didn’t stop the guilt, she thought shakily as she hung up, having assured Mrs Ledbetter that she was leaving immediately for the school.
Did every working mother experience this knife-sharp anguish every time her child cried for her and she couldn’t be there? Guilt was a burden women seemed fashioned by nature to bear.
Not daring to risk disturbing Chas, she wrote a brief note displaying it prominently on his desk, then hurried outside to her Mini.
Simon was waiting for her in the school’s sick bay, looking pale and lethargic. Mandy was with him, and she leaped off her chair and rushed towards Tara, crying importantly, ‘Simon’s been sick, and he was crying, but I’ve been looking after him’
