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Was it any wonder, he would ask her, that he sometimes felt the need to prove his manhood, to lay claim to his own sense of masculinity and self-respect by occasionally flirting with a pretty woman? Flirting, that was all… She was his wife, wasn’t she? He would never leave her, she knew that.
Oh, yes, she knew that, Fern acknowledged heavily.
Now, in the aftermath of her shock, she felt weak and shaky, oddly light-headed in a way that seemed to give her thoughts a relentless, unignorable clarity and intensity.
She should never have married Nick. She didn’t love him and, for all his avowals to the contrary, she suspected that he did not love her. Their marriage was a sham, a deceit, a dishonesty that was slowly infecting not just their relationship with one another, but her whole attitude to life, Fern acknowledged.
She had been not just a fool, but a coward as well. During her parents’ lifeti
me she had told herself that she could not upset and hurt them by revealing the truth about what she felt, but had she simply used them as an excuse because she had been too weak to tackle Nick and make him see that their marriage had to end?
Was the simplest, the easiest, the best thing to walk away from him?
She hugged her arms around her body, shivering still with shock and distress.
She had tried that once before and look what had happened. The discovery that their marriage was simply not working, the knowledge that Nick was involved with someone else—these had sent her running from him, a headlong, unplanned, unthinking flight with no direction to it, motivated solely by her need to escape a situation she could no longer contain or control.
If Adam had not seen her, stopped her, insisted on taking her home with him because he had seen how obviously upset she was…
He had thought it was the discovery of Nick’s infidelity which was upsetting her; the shock of the visit from Nick’s lover shaking her faith in her husband to the roots, never guessing that Fern had actually been on the verge of leaving Nick.
Afterwards she had known that she had to stay; that to leave then after what had happened would have been to make Adam feel responsible for her… to make him feel that he had to…
Men were not like women; men, even the nicest, the kindest, the most compassionate of them, took a very different view of sex from women.
It was not Adam’s fault that he had succumbed to the physical desire she had obviously aroused in him. How could it be? Hadn’t she after all been the one to instigate everything… to urge, encourage, incite and almost beg to complete what they had inadvertently started, when he would have stopped it?
She had been the one to push them both over the edge and into the abyss of guilt and shame from which she could never escape. No blame, no guilt, no responsibility could attach to Adam.
She could feel the slow, hot crawl of colour stinging her skin as she remembered the things she had said, the things she had done… things she had never, could never anticipate doing with Nick.
Nick was right to accuse her of that. She had been a cold, sexually unresponsive wife, unable to understand why Nick’s caresses should leave her so unmoved, so inclined to tense her muscles and pray silently that it would soon be all over. She loved him, didn’t she?
Some women were just not highly sexually motivated, she had comforted herself, and in some way she had felt that Nick was almost pleased by her lack of sexuality. She had tried to discuss it with him in the early days of their marriage, to apologise and ask him to help her understand why, when she knew from all he had told her that he was a very sexually experienced and gifted lover whose previous lovers had more than appreciated his prowess in bed, her body remained so cold and awkwardly unresponsive to his touch.
She had wanted to respond to him; had wanted to experience the pleasure, the knowledge she had heard other women talking about. She had even taken to furtively reading books, nervously purchased from a bookshop on a specially planned trip to London, hoping to discover within their covers something that would explain away the reasons for her lack of arousal.
All they had done had been to reinforce her sense of guilt and despair, even further diminishing her self-confidence and security.
Nick had turned away from her in bored irritation when she had talked to him about it. It was just his bad luck that he had married a woman who was frigid, he had told her. She had been grateful then when he had added that, despite her frigidity, he fully intended to stay married to her. Grateful because in overlooking her inadequacy he was saving her from having to face the humiliation and scorn of the outside world… in having to admit that her marriage was a failure and see the disappointment and pain reflected in her parents’ eyes.
She hadn’t noticed at first how Nick’s tolerance was beginning to change to contempt and criticism… how the way he touched her in bed had started to change from a pattern of orchestrated and obviously knowledgeable caresses to an almost rough immediate penetration followed not only by his physical withdrawal from her and the sight of his hunched back and the back of his head as he turned away from her, but by his emotional and mental withdrawal from her as well.
She knew that it was her fault, of course, but she ached to be able to talk to Nick about what was happening to them, to ask him to be more patient with her… more… more tender, more loving… to give her time.
What was the point? he asked her brutally when she did. Nothing—no one could arouse her. Did she think he actually enjoyed it? he demanded cruelly. Because if so she was wrong. It was simply that as a man he had a need… and that she as his wife had an obligation to allow him to satisfy it.
She had cried herself to sleep the night he had told her that, and for several nights afterwards.
It had been less than a month later when she had begun to suspect that he was having an affair.
How much longer could she go on like this? Fern wondered wretchedly now. No matter how hard she tried to push it to the back of her mind with increasing intensity, the problems within her marriage would push past the mental barriers she had tried to erect against them, forcing themselves to the forefront of her mind, refusing to be ignored.
Nick might have needed her once, as he had claimed, but he didn’t need her now. Living with him, knowing that their marriage was an empty sham, was eating away at her self-respect, adding self-dislike to her already heavy burden of guilt.
She had even begun to find she was avoiding looking at herself in the mirror, almost as though she could no longer face the accusation and misery in her own eyes.
The days were gone when a woman in her position had to remain locked into an unhappy marriage simply because she had no alternative. She was a healthy, intelligent woman of twenty-seven who was surely capable of living on her own and supporting herself financially.
