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Philippa could feel her throat starting to ache as she listened to him. Did he realise how much he was betraying with every word he said? She could hear the anger in his voice when he spoke of his wife’s lack of response to him, and she could hear the yearning and the pain as well.
Stupid, stupid and totally irrational of her to feel jealous of this unknown woman, and yet totally predictable that she should, as well.
Joel eventually shook his head. ‘I’m sorry; you can’t want to hear all this.’
She ought not to want to hear it, Philippa acknowledged, if only from a sense of self-preservation, but there was a morbid, self-destructive fascination in hearing about Joel’s marriage, his relationship with his wife.
‘All relationships suffer… change when there’s a switch in their power base.’ Philippa smiled as she saw the way Joel was watching her. ‘I’m trying to be detached now,’ she admitted wryly. ‘To… to listen to you as a friend and not as…’
‘A lover,’ Joel supplied for her. ‘I didn’t plan what happened between us, Philippa, but it wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that you were there and I wanted sex. If it were just sex I wanted, there are plenty…’ He caught himself up. The last thing he wanted was for Philippa to think he was the kind of man who needed to brag about his sexuality, but there had been enough subtle and sometimes not so subtle come-ons from other women over the years for him to know that he could have quite easily found elsewhere the sexual satisfaction his marriage no longer gave him, if he had really wanted to.
That was what hurt, he acknowledged: the fact that Sally relentlessly accused him of being sexually obsessed when the reality
was that for him sexual desire had to be accompanied by something deeper; and he had thought that Sally knew that.
‘I suppose you think the same as Sally—that I’m a selfish, thoughtless bastard who——’
‘No,’ Philippa interrupted him, shaking her head. ‘It’s just that as a woman…’ She paused. Her marriage was not his, and to tell him that she too knew what it was like to lie intimately sexually entwined with a man with her body while her mind and emotions remained totally unengaged would be to open doors she preferred to keep closed. ‘As a woman,’ she continued, ‘I know that it isn’t always easy trying to combine so many different roles, especially when one of those roles involves being a mother…’
‘I sometimes used to feel that our kids—especially Paul—meant far more to Sally than I did,’ Joel admitted.
‘Fathers often do feel a little bit jealous of their sons,’ Philippa commented.
‘Did your husband?’
She paused and then answered honestly, ‘I don’t know… Andrew and I never discussed our feelings. I was the one who wanted children; he… he never seemed to have any strong feelings for them one way or the other…’ Or for me, she could have added, but she stopped herself, not wanting to sound self-pitying, and besides, wasn’t at least half the truth that she and Andrew had never talked about their feelings because there hadn’t been any real feelings between them to discuss—something she had always known and yet been afraid of confronting, preferring inertia to action, passive acceptance to passionate aggression?
‘Sally and I used to talk a lot once… In bed at night after we’d… she used to lie there in my arms and tell me about her day… That all stopped once Paul was born. He was a difficult baby, restless at night, never wanting to go down, and she used to complain that if we made any noise we’d wake him up.
‘Even when we made love all she seemed to want to do was to get it over with as quickly and quietly as possible.
‘But at least then she still needed me… I could still support her… all of them… Now…’
‘Can’t you see, Joel?’ Philippa told him gently. ‘Her anger is because she’s afraid… because she feels insecure… because she’s worried about the way you’re taking over her role…’
The baffled look he gave her made Philippa smile slightly.
‘I’m just doing what she wants me to do…’
‘Yes, but you’re also usurping her role within the family, just as with her going out to work to support you all you feel she’s usurping yours. It’s like… it’s like when someone does something for us that we’re supposed to be grateful for… Logically we know we should be grateful, but inside a tiny part of us resents them for it, and knowing we feel that resentment makes us feel mean and uncomfortable with ourselves… None of us likes admitting to the darker side of our nature, even though we’ve all got one.
‘I used to feel that my husband never gave our children enough time and attention, and yet I know that deep down inside me a part of me was secretly pleased that it was me they turned to and me they wanted, even though I knew that they needed love and attention from both of us.
‘It’s the same for all of us, whether we want to admit it or not; I suppose we’re all programmed to feel protective and possessive about certain aspects of our most personal lives, about the things we do that give us status, if you like, in our own eyes. While we’re quite happy to compete in a broader circle, when it comes to our most intimate relationships we each want and need to feel confident of supremacy in our own particular sphere.
‘That’s why it’s so difficult for any of us to adapt to the kind of role reversal you and Sally are having to go through. Think about it, Joel. Deep down inside, aren’t you perhaps just a little bit resentful of the fact that Sally is able to work and support you all, even though logically you know you should feel grateful for the fact that she can…?’
He was quiet for so long that Philippa thought she had gone too far, pressed on him too hard, but when he lifted his head and looked at her she expressed her pent-up breath in a small, leaky sigh of relief.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, I suppose I am…’
‘And it’s the same for Sally. She knows she needs your support at home and that she can’t do everything but at the same time she feels hurt because she feels that you and the children no longer seem to need her.’
‘She might be hurt because of the kids, but not because of me,’ Joel denied.
‘When a woman withdraws sexually from a man it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s stopped loving him,’ Philippa told him, but she saw from his expression that she hadn’t sounded as positive as she would have liked and that he had picked up on her real feelings.
‘Talk to her, Joel,’ she urged him. ‘Talk to her the way you’ve just talked to me… ask her why… what’s wrong… Surely your marriage is worth that much of an effort…’
