Payment Due. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ he got in his car to drive away, she called out urgently to him, ‘So you’ll make sure she knows everything, won’t you, Nicholas?’

      The smile he gave her was forced and painful, but she dared not allow herself to waste any sympathy on him. He certainly had not spared a thought for her when he had so recklessly and unwisely involved her without her knowledge in his private affairs.

      She had gone from feeling sorry for him for the sad state of his marriage to feeling that perhaps he and Clarissa deserved one another after all. She had nothing but contempt for adults who so cruelly played childish games with one another’s emotions.

      Surely any good marriage—any worthwhile relationship—demanded total trust, mutual respect, mutual honesty, if that feeling that the human race described as love was going to be allowed a chance to grow to maturity.

      If the kind of relationship Nicholas and Clarissa shared was marriage, commitment, then she was glad she had never experienced it.

      But then she thought of Lucy, Lucy whom she was perhaps unwittingly denying a very important part of her growing up. Would her daughter as an adult have difficulty in relating to the male sex? Would she have emotional problems and hang-ups because of her lack of a male parent, a male influence in her life?

      Uncomfortably she dismissed her thoughts as unproductive, but, later on that evening when Lucy was chatting animatedly about her afternoon at the Fieldings’, describing to her how Tom Fielding was making his daughter her very own personalised stencil for decorating her newly painted bedroom walls, she wondered if she was being over-sensitive in detecting a trace of wistful envy in her daughter’s voice. Lucy’s room in their new flat, while a tenfold improvement on the claustrophobic and damp room she had occupied in their city tower block, was as yet undecorated. Because of the necessity of opening in time for the autumn term trade in new school shoes, there hadn’t been time to do very much as yet with the flat. Once the shop was open and running, then she would be able to turn her attention to making their new home more comfortable.

      She had plenty of ideas, plenty of plans, and, determinedly trying to banish James Warren and his threats from her mind, she tried to concentrate instead on discussing with Lucy just how they would decorate her new room.

      After Lucy had had her bath and gone contentedly to bed, Tania looked around her sitting-room, mentally giving the plain walls a coat of fresh sunny yellow paint. A pretty stencil frieze around the top of the walls would add a little individuality to the décor; she had taught herself a good many domestic skills over the years, out of necessity more than anything else, and she eyed their comfortable settee she had originally bought second-hand, recognising that it was perhaps time it had a new loose cover, perhaps in a plain damask this time now that Lucy was growing up and the importance of a fabric which would not show every mark was no longer essential. Because her great-aunt had refused to modernise the building in any way, the flat still retained its open fireplaces with their nineteenth-century firebacks.

      Worth a fortune now, Ann Fielding had told her enviously, and well worth keeping.

      In addition to its two good-sized bedrooms, the sitting-room, the small room she had turned into her study and the bathroom, the flat also had a kitchen-cum-dining-room, but ultimately Tania hoped to extend the rear ground floor of the building to provide Lucy and herself with a downstairs kitchen with french windows they could open out on to a small courtyard for summer eating.

      That, however, was for the future. For the present … Grimly she stared out of her sitting-room window, for once oblivious to the view across the open countryside.

      She was furious with Nicholas for involving her in what should have been his strictly private affairs, and how on earth Clarissa could be silly enough to believe his lies about her she really had no idea. The woman must surely realise how much her husband doted on her … but then if she was as jealous as Nicholas had implied, almost pathologically so … Tania frowned. The whole situation repelled her, especially those aspects of it which touched upon Clarissa’s relationship with her stepbrother. Clarissa did seem to have an unhealthy dependence on and absorption with her stepbrother.

      Surely he, though, as the elder, as the sophisticated and worldly man he was supposed to be, must have long ago recognised the dangers of Clarissa’s dependence on him? Surely it should have been up to him to gently ensure that his stepsister turned to her husband to satisfy her emotional needs and not to him? Surely it should have been up to him to gently and painlessly put a proper distance between them … ?

      Or was she confronting just another example of the male sex’s vanity and weakness? Did James Warren perhaps actually relish Clarissa’s patent adoration of him, despite Ann’s denial of this?

      Restlessly she moved away from the window. Twenty-four hours, he had said … In twenty-four hours he would return for her decision. She wondered cynically whether, once he had discovered the truth and his mistake, he would apologise to her for his totally unfounded accusations against her. Privately she doubted it. He simply wasn’t the type. She doubted if he had ever admitted to a mistake in his entire life.

      She went to bed early, worn out by the events of the day, acknowledging how much strain she was under with the opening of her shop so imminent. She daren’t even allow herself to contemplate failure. She had to make a success of this venture. For Lucy’s sake if nothing else. She had seen already how much healthier, how much happier her daughter was in their new surroundings. How much less inclined to cling to her.

      In many ways it made her heart ache a little that Lucy should be so willing to spend so much time at the Fieldings’, but then she reminded herself of how isolated she and Lucy had always been and how much this had worried her in the past. How much she had wanted security, self-confidence, and happiness for Lucy.

      It was a long time before she managed to sleep, only to discover in the morning that not only had she overslept but she also had all the signs of an impending migraine.

      Mentally cursing James Warren and all his family, she hurried into the bathroom to discover that she was out of the only tablets she had managed to find which, if taken fast enough, sometimes managed to keep her migraine at bay. She knew from painful experience that once she let the headache take hold nothing would take it away.

      Luckily there was a chemist in the next street, who listened sympathetically to the reason for her early morning call and thankfully was able to supply her with the drug she needed, although her errand took rather longer than she had anticipated, principally because the chemist was a friendly man who liked to chat with his customers. Once Tania had explained who she was he announced warmly, ‘Oh, yes, of course. My wife was saying only the other day that it was a good thing that a decent children’s shoe shop had opened up here. She dreads taking our two into the city to kit them out for school. A proper nightmare, she says it is, so I expect you’ll be seeing her once you’re open.’

      As a potential customer Tania felt she could hardly cut him short and risk offending him, with the result that it was almost half an hour before she was able to hurry back to her own shop.

      As she went upstairs to the flat, she recognised that it sounded oddly silent. Normally as she opened the door she could hear Lucy humming or talking to herself, but today everywhere was silent.

      Her heart started to pound heavily. She had always stressed to Lucy how important it was that she never went anywhere without her; that she never talked to strangers, much less accepted lifts from them, that she never did anything or went with anyone unless she, Tania, had expressly told her beforehand that she might.

      Hurrying into the sitting-room, calling her daughter’s name, Tania came to an abrupt halt as she discovered СКАЧАТЬ