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‘Yes, I was,’ she insisted, but she couldn’t look at him. ‘I was probably in the loo or something when you rang.
Tell me about Sharon.’
‘She’s fine,’ he told her quietly. And then he turned his head and looked away from her. ‘The baby isn’t, though. She lost it.’
She was totally unprepared for the feeling roaring over her: the pain, the despair, the anger and anguish she felt.
‘Well, what are you looking so miserable for?’ she demanded cruelly, driven by what she was feeling to make him hurt and ache as she was doing. ‘That’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it? You should be pleased, not…’
‘Zoe, for God’s sake, that’s not…’
She could hear the anguish in his voice, but she had gone too far to respond to it, her own feelings too emotive, too strong for her to give any recognition to his need.
‘It’s not what? Not what you wanted?’ She looked mercilessly into his haunted face. ‘Don’t he, Ben. Not to me. I know the truth. You never wanted Sharon to have her child.’
‘No!’ he denied thickly. ‘What I never wanted was for her to get pregnant. To distort her life before she had had any chance to even think about what she really wanted. That was what I wanted. This… this senseless, pointless destruction of… this was never… never in my mind, Zoe.’
His voice thickened as he made a small imploring gesture, reached out towards her, and for a second she hesitated. This was Ben, whom she loved, wanting her, needing her, wanting her to recognise and share his pain… but he had not recognised hers. He would never have to suffer what she was suffering now; the very nature and structure of their relationship precluded her from burdening him with her problems.
‘I’m tired,’ she told him distantly. ‘I’m going to bed.’
She still loved him, she acknowledged miserably half an hour later when he slid into bed beside her. It would have been easier if she didn’t. But mingled with that love was also anger and resentment as well as a confused awareness that she was being unfair, that he could not be expected to read her mind, nor to understand that for her the very pivot of their relationship had changed and, from being the one on whom others leaned, there was now a need for support and protection within herself.
‘Zoe.’
She heard him whisper her name as he moved towards her but she rolled over on to her side, keeping her back towards him, ignoring him.
Ben was not the type to force himself on her in any way; she had always been the one to take the lead…
* * *
It was no good. He couldn’t sleep. Throwing back the covers, Ben carefully eased himself out of the bed. Zoe was asleep, genuinely so now.
Where had she been when he had telephoned her earlier? He knew she had lied to him. He had seen it in her eyes.
Had she found someone else; a man who could give her all the things he could not? He had thought that after what he had seen today he was numbed against pain, but he was wrong. He could feel it seeping slowly, with agonising thoroughness, through every sensitive emotion.
His feelings, his love for Zoe were so intense that he was sometimes afraid of admitting them even to himself. All his life he had struggled against this vulnerability within him, against loving too much. He had recognised it first as a child when he had rescued David Bernstein from his antagonists, had recognised it and resented it.
That kind of emotional vulnerability was a luxury someone like him could not afford. He could not allow himself to fall in love. He had other duties… other responsibilities, and until he met Zoe he had thought he had mastered his neediness.
Zoe… He looked across at the bed. In theory she was a product, a child of everything he most resented. Her self-assurance, her confidence, her belief in herself and others’ willingness to please her sprang not from reality but from the protective security of an upbringing which had sheltered her from every kind of emotional and material harm. And yet, instead of resenting her, he had fallen in love with her, letting her bully and chivvy him, letting her take control of their lives and at the same time doing what he had always done for all those closest to him—watching over her with a protective anxiety he never allowed her to see.
He had often thought about what he would do if she left him, if he lost her, trying to do what he could to prepare and arm himself, knowing that if she ever wanted to go he would have to set her free. Ironically, over these last few months, he had actually begun to feel that perhaps after all he might have been wrong, that she might actually stay. But what he had never prepared himself for was the fact that she might lie to him.
It was just something he had not expected. A bald, defiant statement that she had met someone else, yes, but lies, deceit… no.
He glanced again at her sleeping figure. He had ached so much to hold her tonight, to let the pain spill out of him as he filled her with his body and felt her own quicken in response.
He couldn’t tell her about what had happened, about how he had felt. It had never been easy for him to reveal his emotions, and besides, how could he tell her about those long hours spent waiting, hoping, and then knowing… ? Standing with Sharon, holding her hand, trying to comfort the terrified girl who screamed out to him to help her and to stop the pain while her body purged itself of that poor, pathetic, lifeless little body.
You wanted it to happen, Zoe had accused him bitterly, but she had said it without knowing anything of the agony, the anguish, the anger and despair he had suffered in knowing that not all his love, not all his support, nothing he or anyone else could do could save his sister from her pain, nor her child from its death.
He looked back at the bed. His body ached, craved for sleep—he had been up all the previous night with Sharon—but his mind, his thoughts would not allow him any rest.
‘Zoe?’ they had told him at the hotel. ‘No, I’m sorry, she left ages ago. She said she was going to see someone.’
It made him feel more guilty than he could bear to acknowledge that tonight, when all his thoughts should be with his sister, selfishly too many of them were of his own needs and his own fears.
