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‘Like Venice?’ Fern suggested, her voice taut with humiliation, the words escaping from her before she could call them back, even though she knew from experience how much they would infuriate Nick.
‘Like Venice! You couldn’t look like her in a million years,’ he told her scathingly.
‘Good. I wouldn’t want to,’ Fern retorted. ‘Did you see her while you were in London?’ she asked him, attacking before she could lose her courage.
‘See who?’ Nick asked, turning away from her.
Fern gritted her teeth. He knew quite well who. ‘Venice,’ she told him, keeping her head up high as she added challengingly, ‘Apparently she was in London these last few days as well.’
Nick turned round, his mouth cynical and hard, his eyes glittering slightly, but he was avoiding looking directly at her, Fern recognised as he turned to go upstairs.
‘My dear Fern, it may have escaped your notice, but London is a very large place. No… I did not see Venice. Who told you she was in London, anyway? Adam?’
Fern could feel her skin starting to burn.
‘No,’ she told him woodenly. ‘Laura Welch happened to mention it.’
‘Interfering busybody. Still, a single woman of her age… I suppose she’s so desperate for it that—’
Fern turned away, reopening the kitchen door. She loathed it when Nick behaved like this, reverting to the kind of crudity which made her cringe. In the early days of their marriage he had laughed at her for it, calling her a prude, telling her that it was simply the way that real men behaved, but that, since her experience of his sex was limited to her father and Adam, she was unlikely to be aware of it.
She had felt too humiliated then to counter that she did not believe a ‘real’ man as he termed it would ever find it necessary to reinforce his masculinity by the parading of that kind of verbal vulgarity and she still couldn’t say so now, although her expression gave her away…
‘What’s wrong, Fern?’ Nick called contemptuously after her. ‘Don’t you like hearing the truth?’
‘I’m your wife, Nick,’ she told him quietly. ‘And after all it wouldn’t be the first time you’d been unfaithful to me, would it?’
‘And just who the hell is to blame for that?’ Nick demanded aggressively, coming downstairs and following her into the kitchen. ‘If you hadn’t fucked my brother…’
Fern went white and then red, nausea erupting violently inside her stomach, her body tensing as Nick gripped hold of her arm and swung her back to face him.
‘You’re such a prissy little bitch, Fern. My God, you haven’t a clue about what it means to be a real woman… and Adam wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.’
A real woman… They were back to where they had started, Fern recognised miserably. Back to Venice, who no doubt Nick considered to be the epitome of what a ‘real’ woman should be.
‘I’m not Venice, if that’s what you mean,’ she agreed dully, wishing now that she had had the sense to keep silent and say nothing instead of provoking all his aggression and malice… instead of reminding Nick of her guilt, instead of giving him that guilt as a weapon to use against her.
‘What did you do when you were with Adam, Fern?’ Nick challenged her thickly, ignoring her comment about Venice. His eyes were glittering too sharply, like pieces of broken glass, a hectic dangerous flush surging up under his skin. ‘Were you as cold and boring in his bed as you’ve always been in mine? Did you lie there un-moving and unexciting the way you do with me, or did he make you scream with ecstasy when he touched you? Did you beg him to lick you; to suck you; to fuck you… did you, Fern… did you?’
She had gone so cold that her teeth were literally chattering, her body gripped by such a storm of anguished pain that her throat muscles locked against the protest, the denial she wanted to scream out loud…
How could Nick talk to her like that… accuse her… suggest…? But it was her fault that he was doing so, she reminded herself as she shook her head, fiercely trying to blink back the tears filling her eyes. Her fault that he was drawing those ugly destructive images of her. Her fault that he was deliberately defiling something which…
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she heard him mutter as he released her and then stormed out of the kitchen.
She heard him going upstairs and into their bedroom. She couldn’t move. She could only remain where she was, clinging to the back of the chair she was holding on to for support.
Now she made no attempt to stem the weak tears of shock and shame slowly running down her face.
Why on earth hadn’t she simply kept quiet, said nothing, done nothing to provoke him?
Perhaps after all she had been wrong… perhaps he hadn’t been with Venice.
From somewhere inside her a small, caustic, cynical presence she hadn’t known existed raised its voice and demanded tauntingly, ‘That’s it, give in… take the easy way out. Of course he’s been with her. He still smelled of her perfume.’
She stayed in the kitchen until she heard Nick come downstairs and go out again. She had known that this was what he would do. It was a familiar pattern he followed every time they had a quarrel…
When he came back he would be contrite and apologetic. He would remind her of how much she had hurt him… of how much she owed him, of how difficult it was for him to live with the knowledge that she, his wife, the woman he had married… revered… put up on a pedestal above other women, had betrayed him… and with his own stepbrother.
