It was late, gone midnight, when they eventually let themselves into the dark and silent house. The single, low-watt bulbs that were supposed to illuminate the stairs and each landing of the flats obviously needed replacing. Dark, shadowed landings were all very well when he was with Claudia, but he didn't want her having to walk the four flights to their flat on her own when he wasn't there with her. Garth decided, making a mental note to replace the light-bulbs in the morning and to speak to their landlord about them. He was due back with the regiment tomorrow, and later as they lay in bed together, he could hear Claudia sigh. "What is it?" he asked her softly, reaching for her in the darkness. "Nothing, really. I just wish you didn't have to go back tomorrow." "I know, but it won't be for long. I've got some real leave coming up at the end of the month," he reminded her comfortingly. In the darkness, Claudia bit her lip. Some real leave, yes, followed by a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. She was not an army daughter for nothing. "Dad was saying that they're talking about making cuts in any new intake and of amalgamating some of the smaller regiments," she commented. "Mmm ... I know," Garth agreed. His new father-in-law had already warned him about the rumours he'd heard that promotions were going to be hard to come by in the future. At the end of the year. Garth's present contract would expire and he had not yet made his mind up whether or not he would sign on for another term. When he had originally decided on a career in the army, he had not been thinking about how it would affect a wife and children, but he had recently seen several of his peers' marriages break down under the pressure of the separations that an army wife inevitably suffered. As Garth bent his head in the darkness to find her mouth with his own, Claudia knew that it wasn't just the thought of his departure tomorrow that was bothering her. On Monday morning, she started her new job working as a probation officer for one of the London borough councils. Technically, she was well qualified for the job but she had felt at her interview that her supervisor seemed, for same reason, antagonistic towards her. Nothing she could actually put her finger on, just one or two slightly add remarks about her background and a sense of the other woman's rather challenging attitude, although, to be fair, she had to admit that the inner-city conditions in which she would be working were going to be tough. "The army life I've been brought up in isn't a totally protected environment," Claudia had responded as calmly as she could to Janice Long's sharp probing. "There can be problems with drink and drugs, marital breakdowns and, of course, the trauma of men being badly injured and killed." Then. " the other woman had responded, 'but here in this borough, we often have to deal with children who have been abused ... beaten... starved, subjected to every kind of emotional and physical as well as sexual degradation. They are so vulnerable it's easy for them to go off the rails." She had added, "How well do you think you are equipped to deal with them?" "I'm not," Claudia had replied honestly. "I doubt that anyone is. I can't imagine that it's ever possible to totally ignore one's feelings under such circumstances, but with time and training I hope and believe that one can put aside one's own personal response in order to help those we're there to help." She had got the job but she suspected that she had not really convinced Janice Long that she was the right candidate for it. "Mmm..." Garth murmured as he nibbled at her lips. "You taste good... You taste good all over, Clo/ he added huskily as he lowered his head and started nibbling gently at the tender flesh of her throat. Claudia's whole body quivered. She knew what that particular note in Garth's voice meant. The first time he had told her that he wanted to kiss her, taste her all over, she had been more shocked than aroused, and even now there was still a part of her that felt faintly awkward, uncertain, about the intimacy of what he was doing. Although the sensation of his mouth. She shuddered more deeply as his warm, moist tongue started to circle her nipple, then she closed her eyes and deliberately willed herself to stop thinking about tomorrow and to enjoy instead the delicious sensation of sensual pleasure and sexual excitement that was building up inside her body. As Garth felt her body begin to relax, he started to draw her nipple deeper into his mouth, alternately teasing it with delicate flicks of his tongue then with a much deeper, hungrier, full- mouthed suckling that made Claudia tense her muscles and arch her back as her whole body responded to the rhythmic pressure of his mouth. Garth loved Claudia's breasts. He loved all of her, of course, but her breasts were just perfect, filling the palms of his hands when he cupped them, soft and warm and satin skinned, her nipples a warm coral pink discreetly demure when she was not aroused but very erotically hard and swollen in response to his lovemaking. Her breasts were, in fact, a reflection of Claudia herself, modest and quiescent publicly, but privately, delicious and erotic and unexpectedly very sensually responsive. In the darkness, Claudia felt Garth's hand stroking her breasts, then moving to her waist and lower. Automatically, she moved with him, parting her legs, quivering slightly with the onset of her need to feel him within her. His index finger circled her navel and teased a little bit farther down. In response, Claudia bit reprimandingly on his ear in a mingling of feminine urgency and warning. Recognising this wordless signal of her need, Garth tugged passionately on her nipple, using his body weight to keep her pinned to the bed beneath him as he felt the reactive shudders of responsive pleasure galvan ising her body. The last thing on Claudia's mind now was work. The only thoughts she wanted or needed to have were those of Garth and how he was making her feel; of how he would soon be making her feel when the full, strong, pulsating length of him was sheathed hotly inside her own body. Behind her dosed eyelids, she was already visualising the coming together of their bodies, his proud and hard, the skin stretched tight over the passion-filled, dark-veined surge of his manhood, the glands totally and, to her mind, oddly vulnerably exposed, the skin hot and silky to her touch, thirsty for the tender moistness that lay within her own body, which she pictured as a soft, wet, life-giving protective place where he would be kept safe. Here in this secret and private garden of Eden, his body could take its fill of pleasure in perfect safety until with all the sternness of the sleeping Earth Mother once worshipped and feared by the ancient Greeks, she reminded him of his duty, his purpose, the soft muscles that had held him so tenderly now tightening around him, making him, making both of them, obey the laws of nature as they drew from him the spark of life. It might not technically be necessary to have an orgasm in order to become pregnant, but Claudia was secretly convinced that there was something about the deep, convulsive movement that rendered her womb particularly responsive and receptive to the act of procreation, the creation of a new life. If that was not the case, then why had Mother Nature specifically designed a woman so that she should experience this need to have her man penetrate her so deeply, completely, that she should feel as she did right now, Claudia asked herself dizzily . and why also would a man want to do so? If the clitoris was a woman's prime source of pleasure, then why should she have this need, this urgency, this wanton, aching, screaming com n pulsion to urge Garth ever deeper inside her, to feel the hot, wet explosion of his release just as close to her womb as he could possibly get? Very slowly. Garth released Claudia's nipple, kissing his way down over her flat belly, her skin damp and softly sheeny with sexual arousal, but she still covered her sex with her hand. Circling her navel with his tongue. Garth placed his hand over hers, lacing his fingers down through hers as he slowly and deliberately stroked the crisp dark curls that covered her pubic mound and then slipped one finger deeper, parting the demurely closed outer lips of her sex to explore the moist sensuality they were concealing. The sensation of her own hand pressed hard against her pubic bone while Garth's finger stroked her made Claudia moan a small, shocked protest. There had been times, rather shockingly frequent occasions, in fact, during their engagement when Garth had not been there, when she had lain alone on her bed touching herself, exploring herself, initially simply idly, wondering how she might feel to Garth. But then, as her newly aroused female senses caught fire, her touch had been more deliberate, more purposeful and urgent. She had never discussed these acts with Garth, nor had he previously indicated that he knew that they took place. Now, instinctively, she realised that he did, an awareness that was confirmed when he whispered rawly against her stomach, "I want you to think of me like this when I'm not here, Clo. I want you to remember how good it feels. It does feel good, doesn't it. " Unable to stop herself from shuddering as his fingertip gently rotated the small, throbbing, almost too sensitive nub of her clitoris, Claudia could only moan a choked response. Automatically, her legs were opening, her hips moving in a hungry, grinding motion as she locked the fingers of her free hand in Garth's hair and tugged protestingly, at the same time trying to free her other hand. Amazingly, Garth let it go, his own hands reaching for her hips. Claudia expelled her breath in a relief-cracked groan, eagerly anticipating the slow thrust of him within her achingly responsive and ready body, but instead of penetrating her. Garth lowered his head and manoeuvred her so that her body opened easily and eagerly for him as he ran the tip of his tongue from her clitoris right down the length of her most private region and then back up again, firmly repeating the caress over and over again until the whole of her sex felt swollen and wet, tingling, aching, with the heat of a sexual urgency so intense that had she been able, Claudia knew that she would have taken the initiative herself. Even so, it shocked her when Garth seemed to read her mind, taking hold of her and rolling down onto the bed on his back while he lifted her over his body, over it and down onto it, down onto him. Tou want me. take me," he whispered rawly to her. "Show me how hungry you are for me, Clo. -show me how much you want me. Yes, that's it," he told her thickly as she moved on top of him, lifting her hips, then lifting herself as she slowly and uncertainly at first started to ride him. The look on his face told her all she needed to know, giving her the courage and encouragement to take control of her own sexuality and of him. She heard him groan as she deliberately compressed her muscles and held him still. Hungrily, he reached for her breasts. Claudia leaned forward, moving oh so slowly and deliberately up and down the thick, hot moistness of his shaft, slowly at first then faster while Garth groaned and kneaded her breast and then reached down between her legs to tug on her now erotically engorged clitoris. The combined sensation of Garth touching her while his penis filled her was almost too much for Claudia to bear. She was aware of a sensation of hurtling towards a barrier and knew that once through it she would have absolutely no control. Everything was rushing over her too fast for her to stop and she heard herself cry out Garth's name. Then she screamed as her body exploded in a climax so intense that she was still shuddering with the aftershock of it minutes later when she lay wrapped in Garth's arms, the tears of release lying damply on his chest. "That's how I want you to remember me... ms... when I'm not here," Garth whispered roughly to her as he kissed her damp eyelids and then her mouth. "That's how I'm going to make love to you the night we conceive our child." They had already talked about the family they planned to have, not for a while yet, but neither of them wanted to wait too long. Claudia wanted four children, two boys and two girls, but Garth had demurred that maybe they should stop at two. "Four will be expensive to educate, especially if I stay on in the army," he had warned her. That was another subject they had discussed at great length. Claudia was well aware of what it meant to be an army wife, and the last thing she would ever do would be to want to come between Garth and a career he loved, but Garth himself, as she knew, was now having second thoughts about his own commitment to the army. "I wish you weren't going back tomorrow," Claudia repeated drowsily to him as she started to slide towards sleep. Garth groaned. "So do I. Oh, God, Clo, but that was good.-.yoy were good...." Slowly and lovingly, he ran his hands over her orgasm-relaxed body. He didn't consider himself to be a man who was in any way oversexed and he hoped he wasn't a selfish lover, but he was, he acknowledged, quite highly sexed and Claudia aroused him as no other woman had ever done or would ever do. If they woke up early enough in the morning, he would be able to make love to her again before he had to leave. As he eased her body down against his own, he wondered how she would react if he asked her to forgo wearing any underwear the next time he came home. Just Clo. -show me how much you want me. Yes, that's it," he told her thickly as she moved on top of him, lifting her hips, then lifting herself as she slowly and uncertainly at first started to ride him. The look on his face told her all she needed to know, giving her the courage and encouragement to take control of her own sexuality and of him. She heard him groan as she deliberately compressed her muscles and held him still. Hungrily, he reached for her breasts. Claudia leaned forward, moving oh so slowly and deliberately up and down the thick, hot moistness of his shaft, slowly at first then faster while Garth groaned and kneaded her breast and then reached down between her legs to tug on her now erotically engorged clitoris. The combined sensation of Garth touching her while his penis filled her was almost too much for Claudia to bear. She was aware of a sensation of hurtling towards a barrier and knew that once through it she would have absolutely no control. Everything was rushing over her too fast for her to stop and she heard herself cry out Garth's name. Then she screamed as her body exploded in a climax so intense that she was still shuddering with the aftershock of it minutes later when she lay wrapped in Garth's arms, the tears of release lying damply on his chest. "That's how I want you to remember me... ms... when I'm not here," Garth whispered roughly to her as he kissed her damp eyelids and then her mouth. "That's how I'm going to make love to you the night we conceive our child." They had already talked about the family they planned to have, not for a while yet, but neither of them wanted to wait too long. Claudia wanted four children, two boys and two girls, but Garth had demurred that maybe they should stop at two. "Four will be expensive to educate, especially if I stay on in the army," he had warned her. That was another subject they had discussed at great length. Claudia was well aware of what it meant to be an army wife, and the last thing she would ever do would be to want to come between Garth and a career he loved, but Garth himself, as she knew, was now having second thoughts about his own commitment to the army. "I wish you weren't going back tomorrow," Claudia repeated drowsily to him as she started to slide towards sleep. Garth groaned. "So do I. Oh, God, Clo, but that was good ... you were good...." Slowly and lovingly, he ran his hands over her orgasm-relaxed body. He didn't consider himself to be a man who was in any way oversexed and he hoped he wasn't a selfish lover, but he was, he acknowledged, quite highly sexed and Claudia aroused him as no other woman had ever done or would ever do. If they woke up early enough in the morning, he would be able to make love to her again before he had to leave. As he eased her body down against his own, he wondered how she would react if he asked her to forgo wearing any underwear the next time he came home. Just Clo. -show me how much you want me. Yes, that's it," he told her thickly as she moved on top of him, lifting her hips, then lifting herself as she slowly and uncertainly at first started to ride him. The look on his face told her all she needed to know, giving her the courage and encouragement to take control of her own sexuality and of him. She heard him groan as she deliberately compressed her muscles and held him still. Hungrily, he reached for her breasts. Claudia leaned forward, moving oh so slowly and deliberately up and down the thick, hot moistness of his shaft, slowly at first then faster while Garth groaned and kneaded her breast and then reached down between her legs to tug on her now erotically engorged clitoris. The combined sensation of Garth touching her while his penis filled her was almost too much for Claudia to bear. She was aware of a sensation of hurtling towards a barrier and knew that once through it she would have absolutely no control. Everything was rushing over her too fast for her to stop and she heard herself cry out Garth's name. Then she screamed as her body exploded in a climax so intense that she was still shuddering with the aftershock of it minutes later when she lay wrapped in Garth's arms, the tears of release lying damply on his chest. "That's how I want you to remember me... ms... when I'm not here," Garth whispered roughly to her as he kissed her damp eyelids and then her mouth. "That's how I'm going to make love to you the night we conceive our child." They had already talked about the family they planned to have, not for a while yet, but neither of them wanted to wait too long. Claudia wanted four children, two boys and two girls, but Garth had demurred that maybe they should stop at two. Tour will be expensive to educate, especially if I stay on in the army," he had warned her. That was another subject they had discussed at great length. Claudia was well aware of what it meant to be an army wife, and the last thing she would ever do would be to want to come between Garth and a career he loved, but Garth himself, as she knew, was now having second thoughts about his own commitment to the army. "I wish you weren't going back tomorrow," Claudia repeated drowsily to him as she started to slide towards sleep. Garth groaned. "So do I. Oh, God, Clo, but that was good ... you were good...." Slowly and lovingly, he ran his hands over her orgasm-relaxed body. He didn't consider himself to be a man who was in any way oversexed and he hoped he wasn't a selfish lover, but he was, he acknowledged, quite highly sexed and Claudia aroused him as no other woman had ever done or would ever do. If they woke up early enough in the morning, he would be able to make love to her again before he had to leave. As he eased her body down against his own, he wondered how she would react if he asked her to forgo wearing any underwear the next time he came home. Just the thought of her sweet, warm body being covered only by a dress or skirt made him start to ache and tingle. Stop that, he warned his slowly engorging penis sternly. You're going to have to wait until morning. Claudia listened intently as Janice Long started to outline the details of one of the cases Claudia would be working on. "She's eighteen now," she told Claudia, watching her reaction to the identity photograph inside the file depicting a ravishingly pretty darkhaired girl. "She's also a heroin addict," her supervisor continued grimly. "She first came to our notice three years ago when the police picked her up for soliciting. She told us then that she was seventeen and that she'd run away from home because her stepfather was abusing her. It's a common enough story," she added when she heard Claudia's quickly indrawn breath of pity. "Yes, I know," Claudia agreed, 'but that doesn't make it any the less appalling. " "Mmm ... I dare say it wouldn't if it happened to be true. Katriona, though, unfortunately happens to be an extremely skilled and habitual liar. Most of these girls are. They live in a fantasy world half the time. That's part of their problem. Ours is trying to separate the fantasy from the reality." Although she didn't say so, Claudia thought the older woman was being unduly hard. The girl was, after all, just that, and it made Claudia's compassionate heart ache for her to think of how frightened she must have been to find herself on the streets, alone and vulnerable. As Janice Long watched her, she sighed under her breath. Here was another one, wet behind the ears and dewy-eyed, running over with the milk of human kindness for the rest of mankind. Well, she'd soon learn, just as she'd had to do herself. The people they were dealing with might be victims and in need of their help but that didn't stop them from possessing their fair share of human vices, being manipulative and crafty, underhanded, deceitful, dishonest and sometimes downright dangerous. Katriona, for all her stunning good looks and her comparative youth, was no angel. Unlike many others of her ilk, her drug habit had not been forced on her by a manipulative pimp intent on keeping her 'on the game' so that he could live off the money she made him. Katriona didn't have a pimp--she didn't need one as she had more than once boasted to Janice. She was the one who used men, not the other way around. She had told Janice that she started using drugs simply because she wanted to see how it felt and she had laughed when the young trainee with Janice at the time was unable to conceal her shocked reaction at this information. Privately, Janice suspected that Katriona paid for her addiction by selling drugs to some of the other youngsters who shared the squat with her, but neither she nor the police had ever been able to prove it. "You can't pin anything on me," Katriona had announced smugly the last time the police had picked her up and Janice had known that she was pleased by their inability to do anything. One thing Janice did know, or rather thought she knew, was that, despite all her denials, at some stage in her life Katriona had been abused in some way by a man, if not sexually then certainly emotionally and physically. Her hatred and bitter contempt of them were classic signs even if Katriona herself would never admit it. The whole of her past was, in fact, shrouded in mystery, but again that was not so unusual with these youngsters. Boys as well as girls arrived in London, sleeping rough and disappearing into the teeming underworld of youthful vice and squalor until they were picked up by the police and passed on to the social services. By that time, they had generally invented a new past for themselves. Sometimes, unfortunately all too rarely, fate was kind and a much loved youngster was reunited with his or her distraught parents, but more often than not. Janice frowned as she studied Claudia's down-bent head. They always proved to be more trouble than they were worth, these upper middle-class, overidealistic young graduates who hadn't a clue what life was really all about and who still described their parents as "Mummy' and " Daddy' while working with. Mummy and Daddy. God, Katriona would laugh in her face. Either that or scream a torrent of vile abuse at her the moment she heard Claudia's "Queen's' English accent. But it was not her job to protect the likes of the Claudias of this world from reality. No one had forced her to take the job--a job for which she was completely and culturally unfit so far as Janice was concerned. She herself had grown up on a vast council estate in the north of England. The only reason she had ever been allowed to take up the place she had won to the local grammar school had been because the headmaster of her junior school had stepped in and persuaded her parents to allow her to go. Even then, there had been the indignity of having to wear a second-hand uniform, of there never being enough money to pay for her school dinners--and as for any school trips. She had soon learned to adopt an attitude of indifference to shield herself from the taunts of her schoolmates. At university, when she hadn't been studying for her degree, she had been working to support herself and keeping out of the way of the bosses. Bar work during term time and the backbreaking slog of fruit picking during the summer. Those summer jobs had been the worst. You always got some man who thought you owed him a favour for letting you have the job--and the kind of favour he wanted meant lying on your back with your legs wide open for him. Well, not Janice. She had seen too much of what that brought you. "But who are her parents? Where has she come from?" she heard Claudia asking her frowningly as she studied the file Janice had given her. Janice gave a small shrug. "Who knows? Maybe not even her. With her looks, she could have Gypsy or Italian blood but..." Janice gave another shrug. "But hasn't anyone ever asked her, talked to her?" Claudia protested. Janice raised her eyebrows. "Talked to her? We're dealing with an out and out heroin addict here. You don't talk to them... you talk at them and if you're lucky something might just about get through." "You sound as though... as though she's someone to be written off." "She's already written herself off," Janice told her brutally. "She'll be dead before she's twenty- one." "But surely something can be done," Claudia persisted, unable to conceal her shock. "A rehab clinic... or..." Janice shook her head. "You'd be wasting your time and the taxpayers' money," she countered grimly. "She'd never agree to go into rehab and even if she did... One of the first things you have to understand is that..." She paused and shook her head. What was the point in telling her? Let the girl find out for herself. Young trainees. Why the hell did she always have to be landed with them? and Betray 131 * * Determinedly, Claudia refused to allow her feelings of revulsion to show as she followed Janice up the cold, damp concrete stairwell littered with rubbish, its air heavy with the fetid stench of urine and vomit. The huge tower block, like its neighbours, was a rabbit warren of crumbling concrete, of decaying lives. Its very existence, Claudia reflected, was an indictment, a testimony, of man's inhumanity to man. "Two more flights," Janice puffed. "By the way, don't ever be tempted to risk the lifts in these places," she warned Claudia. "They're notorious for breaking down one of our team forgot and ended up being trapped inside one for almost forty-eight hours." Claudia shuddered. "Here we are," Janice announced. "It's this way." Numbly, Claudia followed her supervisor as she hurried down the walkway that overlooked the dismal rectangle of land enclosed by the tower blocks. Down below them on the ground, a group of teenagers kicked aimlessly at the rubbish that had fallen from a skip, their shoulders hunched defensively, defeatedly, Claudia recognised. "It's this one," Janice told her, stopping outside a flat that looked more like a heavily fortified prison than a home, its windows blank and barred, its original wooden door replaced by one of heavy [محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]l. Janice rapped briskly and then waited. Claudia could hear the sounds of bolts being withdrawn on the other side of the door and her stomach muscles started to clench. A sharp sense that she was somehow standing at the portal of a potentially fateful event suddenly swept through her, banishing logic and reason. As a panel was pushed to one side to reveal a spy hole, Claudia fought the temptation to give in to the inner voice urging her to flee, to leave, before it was too late. "What do you want?7 she heard a male voice demanding truculently from inside the flat. "I want to see Katriona Spencer," Janice responded crisply. "Well, she don't want to see you," the voice responded. "She's busy doing a bit of business. Know what I mean?" he added with a leering laugh. "Tell her no visit, no giro payment," Janice told him unperturbedly. There was a few minutes' wait, then just when Claudia thought they were going to have to leave, she could hear the sound of further heavy bolts being drawn back and the door swung open. If she had thought the stench on the stairs hardly bearable, it was nothing compared to the appalling smell from inside the flat. It made her gag and want to retch as she followed Janice inside. It was, she acknowledged, the stench of degradation and pollution, of human beings who had descended into something dark and obscene. As Claudia followed Janice through the claustrophobic hallway and into the room that lay beyond it, a thin bearded youth, his torso bare, his jeans pulled down to reveal his flat, thin buttocks, stood up and slowly started to pull them up. Behind him on a filthy mattress a girl lay naked. Hastily, Claudia averted her eyes, but Janice far more hardily demanded, "Where's Katriona, Lucy?" "She's upstairs," the girl responded listlessly, ignoring her nudity and her spread-legged pose as she reached across the grubby mattress for the needle that Claudia could now see glinting in the thin light coming into the room. As she moved, Claudia could see the existing needle tracks in her arms, and her emotions switched from shocked revulsion to compassionate pity. "Save it," Janice advised her, correctly reading her thoughts as she indicated that they were to go upstairs. "Like Katriona, Lucy services her habit through prostitution," she informed Claudia as they walked back into the hallway. "Unlike Katriona, though--at least as yet--Lucy has one prison sentence behind her and another all too likely." "What for?" Claudia asked her, expecting to hear that the girl had stolen goods to pay for her habit or perhaps sold them to the other users. Instead, to her shock, Janice told her bluntly, "She murdered her own child--oh, it's not uncommon," she warned Claudia when she saw her expression. "It wasn't deliberate, of course. It never is. She just lost her temper with the poor little sod one night when the punters hadn't paid her enough for her fix. She lost her temper and lashed out at him when he didn't get out of the way in time. She picked him up and threw him against the wall. He was five years old and a tough little tyke but not tough enough--she broke his skull. Luckily for him he died in hospital three days later without recovering consciousness." "Luckily!" Claudia protested, too shocked to hide her feelings. "If he'd lived, he'd have been brain damaged and if Lucy wasn't prepared to look after him properly, to love and protect him as a healthy, undamaged child, just what chance do you think he would have had with the handicap she inflicted on him?" Claudia made no answer. What answer was there to make? "In here," Janice instructed as they reached the landing. She pushed open one of the bedroom doors. After the filth and squalor of the downstairs flat, combined with the horror of the story she had just been told, the sight of the young woman seated on the bed studying her reflection in the dressing-table mirror as she slowly brushed her lustrous, long black hair was so incongruous, so normal, that Claudia could only stare at her. Unlike the girl they had just seen below, this one was clear-eyed and intelligent-looking, her green eyes sharply intent in her small triangular face. She was very pretty, more than pretty, Claudia acknowledged, round about her own build but taller, dressed in a long-sleeved, unexpectedly clean-looking T-shirt and a pair of jeans. "Who's this?" the girl demanded of Janice, jerking her head in Claudia's direction. "Claudia has just joined us," Janice explained smoothly. The other girl gave Claudia a contemptuous look. "A trainee, eh. Jesus, just look at her," she mocked. "I'll bet she's never even opened her legs for a man, never mind..." Claudia battened down her instinctive sense of outrage and revulsion, her anger at the way the girl was unwittingly intruding on the privacy of her lovemaking with Garth, defiling it almost, her training coming to the fore as she calmly ignored what the girl was saying. "Never mind that, Katriona," Janice challenged her, reaching out before the girl could stop her and holding her wrist firmly with one hand while with the other she pushed up the fabric of her shirt to reveal a heartbreakingly fragile arm and its even more heartbreaking evidence of her drug use. "She certainly doesn't use," she told the girl sharply, 'and neither would you if you had any brains. " "No?" the girl derided, tossing back the thick, heavy weight of her glossy, curly hair. "Well, I've certainly got enough sense not to fall for that old line. What do you want?" "You're on probation for soliciting," Janice reminded her. "It's a condition of your probation that we see you." "So, you've seen me." Katriona shrugged dismissively, then reached out to the dressing-table for a lipstick and started to apply it carefully to her soft, full mouth. She was ftne-boned, her movements light and fluid like those of a dancer. Who was she, where had she come from and why. why did she stay here, living like this, when quite plainly. Claudia reined her thoughts in. One of the first things she had learned was that it wasn't her role to judge or to question. "You don't have to do this, Katriona," Janice told her quietly. "An hour from now, you could be trapped in a car with a John who's got a knife at your throat and who's refusing to pay you for what you've done. Even if he does, you've got to get back here without any of the pimps catching you. Why bother when you could have a prescription for methadone and--' " Go into rehab? Forget it. " "You're a fool, Katriona. One day, you're going to be like Lucy downstairs, too drugged out to bother closing your legs between punters, never mind getting dressed. Is that what you want?" "I'll never be like Lucy," Katriona denied fiercely, her green eyes flashing with fury as she rounded on Janice. "Now, get out of here. Get out! And the next time," she commanded as Janice shrugged and started to head for the door, 'next time... send her." Send her. Claudia blinked in astonishment as the other girl pointed towards her. "I mean it," Katriona stressed. "She gets in ... you don't. Understand?" You're looking awfully pea ky darling. Is everything all right? " "Everything's fine. Mummy," Claudia snapped, then regretted it as she saw the hurt expression on her mother's face. "I'm sorry," she apologised, placing her hand on Jean Fulshaw's arm in a gesture of remorse. "I'm... I'm just a bit tired, that's all and..." Mentally, she gave herself a small shake. The last thing she wanted was to start feeling sorry for herself or to start complaining to her mother that she was missing Garth. The regiment was in Northern Ireland. Garth had managed a snatched and unsatisfactory twenty-four-hours' leave before his departure, and they had made love with a passionate intensity, which, while physically fulfilling, had somehow left her feeling emotional and weepy. It hadn't gone down very well at work when she had asked for leave herself at such short no tice. Eyes glistening with tears, she kissed her mother goodbye and watched as she climbed onto the train. She had come up to London to spend the day with Claudia and do some shopping, but Claudia simply hadn't been in the mood. The heavy cold she had had the previous month had left her feeling lethargic and run-down. It hadn't helped that one of the other probation officers had been transferred, leaving Claudia to take on most of his workload in addition to her own. Janice might be right, she acknowledged wryly. Perhaps she really wasn't cut out to do the job. "Don't take it home with you," Janice had advised her, but Claudia was finding it increasingly difficult to put up the necessary emotional barrier to separate herself from the problems of her clients, especially Katriona. "You're becoming too involved," Janice had warned her and she was right. There was something about this particular girl, something compelling and haunting about the sheer, senseless waste and tragedy that her life had become. "It doesn't have to be like this," Claudia had counselled her, forgetting her professionalism in her longing to be able to do something to help change things for her before it was too late. "It's already too late," Janice had told her shortly when Claudia discussed the case with her, her emotions overcoming her awareness that her supervisor already thought that she was overly emotional for the job. But how much of that assessment was the truth and how much was caused by a not unnatural sense of resentment because of the way Katriona had insisted that the only person she would speak with was Claudia? "She's doing it because she knows you're new to the job," Janice had warned her grimly, shortly after a case conference meeting, where it had been decided that in view of the rapport Claudia seemed to have established with Katriona, she be assigned as Katriona's permanent caseworker. "Personally, I don't know why we are so accommodating with the girl," she had sniffed, but of course she did. They all did. Katriona was playing a very dangerous game. In return for a certain amount of leeway as regards her own activities, she was supplying the police with information on a large ring of drug suppliers who, like her, operated in the sprawling underworld the flats had become. "You'll have to be careful," Claudia had warned her when Katriona had talked derisively to her about how easy it was to get men to confide in her. "If they find out..." But Katriona had simply laughed. "They won't. To them I'm just another quick. fuck. They seem to forget that while I've got my mouth wrapped round their cock, I might not be able to talk, but I can still listen, and anyway, what can they do?" She had shrugged. "Nothing. I know too much. Not like you," she had taunted Claudia. "You know nothing. How old were you when you lost your virginity?" she had demanded. Claudia had shaken her head but had still not quite been able to stop herself from blushing. Katriona sometimes seemed more interested in cross-questioning Claudia about her life than in talking about her own. "Mummy and Daddy/ she had mimicked once. "I'll bet they spoiled you rotten, didn't they? And I'll bet he does, too, doesn't he?" she had challenged as she grabbed hold of Claudia's hand and looked at her wedding ring, demanding, "What's he like... is he any good in bed? God, why am I asking you that? If he is, you know what that means, don't you? " she had taunted. "They don't get to know what turns a woman on by saving themselves for their little bridey wifey, you know. "Has he ever used a pro? How do you know? Have you ever asked him?" she had asked as Claudia shook her head during one meeting, then had laughed when Claudia started to gather up her papers. "Hit a nerve there, didn't I?" she had crowed. "They all do it, you know," she had added softly. "No matter how respectable, how faithful, how loving they make out they are, they all do it. For all you know, he could be a regular client... one of my clients...." She had paused, waiting, for even though Claudia had begun to get the measure of her and to know how much Katriona loved getting her off guard, she had still risen to the bait and returned coldly, "I very much doubt it. Garth is in the army. He rarely comes to London and--' " Oh, the army. Well, they're the worst of the lot," Katriona had interrupted her, her mouth curving in a triumphant smile, her green cat's eyes glittering with the onset of the craving she still told herself she could control. "How did you meet him?" she had asked casually, but Claudia had got herself back under control. Katriona had a long, raw wound on her left arm that looked as though it had been caused by a knife. Even as she made that judgement, Claudia was aware of just how much she had learned already. Six months ago, she wouldn't have known what a knife wound looked like, never mind instantly recognise one. "Lucy did it," Katriona told her carelessly as she saw Claudia frowning at it. "It looks nasty," Claudia commented. "Has anyone seen it?" "Sure... every punter I've had since she did it two nights ago, and that must be, oh... I dunno, say ... ten or maybe twenty. There was a group of them last night. Kids from some posh school, too shit scared to do it alone, so I said the others could watch while I showed one of them what it was all about. Christ, they were a real bunch of wankers--literally--but still, they paid well." Claudia said nothing. She was used to Katriona by now and knew how much she liked to shock her. Firmly refusing to be sidetracked, she sat down. Katriona had steadfastly refused to give them any personal details about herself, and it was part of Claudia's job to do what she could to find out something--anything--about her background and her family. "You must have parents, Katriona," she began. "They--' "Must I?" Katriona interrupted her bitterly. "Why? Because the rule book says so? Well, I've got news for you. Life isn't always played by the rules." "But you must have someone. A mother... a father ... grandparents..." "Grandparents." Katriona gave a bitter yelp of laughter. "Christ, if I had, they'd be ancient. My mother was forty-seven when she had me--I was a miracle baby. They thought they couldn't have children, you see. They'd been married twenty- six years when I arrived. Perhaps someone should have told them that they needed to have sex a bit sooner than they did. " "They must have loved you very much," Claudia suggested gently. "Must they? I wouldn't know. My mother was still in shock from the trauma of the neighbours knowing that she'd slept with my father. She died... a heart attack, because having me had weakened her heart, you see. She was just too damned old, that was the truth of it." Although Claudia winced at the cruelty in Katriona's voice, she forced herself not to make any comment other than saying quietly, "What about your father?" "My father... Oh, he was a saint," Katriona told her cynically. "Everyone said so, and so it must be true, mustn't it? Can't think how they produced me, can you?" "Is he still alive?" Claudia pressed her. Katriona shrugged. She had injected herself just before Claudia's visit and the drug was al and Betray 143 ready beginning to take effect. The last thing she wanted to do right now was to talk about her bloody parents. "I don't know and I certainly don't care. Why should I? He never cared about me. His bloody school mattered more to him than I did." "His school?" Claudia questioned. "He was a teacher. A housemaster," Katriona emphasised mockingly, her accent changing, mirroring the clear, well-modulated tones of Claudia's own voice. "He taught at a private school--for boys. They didn't take girls, so I had to go to the local village school, but he taught me at home, as well. They... my parents... had originally met when they were both up at Oxford, and although they couldn't afford to send me to a private school, he was determined that I would get a place at my mother's old college." "Which college was that?" Claudia asked her, guessing when Katriona made no response but simply closed her eyes and turned her head away, "Lady Margaret Hall. Somerville "Think you're bloody clever, don't you?" Katriona growled at her. "What the hell does it matter which college it was? There was no way I was going there. If I had wanted to go to university, I'd have wanted it to be somewhere a hell of a lot more trendy than bloody Oxford. Essex. somewhere like that, but he would never have agreed to that. So far as he was concerned, it was Oxford or nothing. Even Cambridge wouldn't have been good enough. " Claudia said nothing but she could hear the bitterness and the anger beneath the seeming contempt in the other girl's voice. "Did you like school, Katriona?" she asked. "Like school?" Katriona yelped with laughter. "Oh sure... I loved it. I loved sticking out like a sore thumb and being the target of the other kids because I was the one with the dad who taught at the big posh private school. Just like I loved having to spend every damned evening locked inside with him, listening to him ranting on about how important it was for me to have a good education. Well, I soon showed him that as far as I was concerned, there was far more to life than the classics and that when it came to what really mattered, what was really important, I could teach those upper-class idiots he was supposed to be educating some far more important facts of life than anything they'd ever learn from him. Not that he or the head saw it that way. " She opened her eyes and gave Claudia a vulpine smile. "So learning how to go down properly on a boy wasn't on the ti[محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]ble. So what? I'll bet they got a hell of a lot more mileage out of what I taught them than they ever did from Pa's lessons and it made him realise that I was there. " Claudia could see the anger and resentment in her eyes now, as well as hear it in her voice, and her tender heart ached for her. Reading between the lines of the sketchy tale Katriona had just drawn for her, Claudia suspected that her father, so much older than his daughter and plainly more used to the company of boys than girls, had perhaps in Katriona's eyes appeared to reject her after her mother's death and that she had decided if the only way she could gain his attention was by behaving 'badly' and breaking the rules, then that was what she would do. "It's not too late, Katriona," she had said softly. "You could still go back. You could--' " Of course it's too bloody late," Katriona interrupted her furiously. "My God, you make me sick, you're so stupid. And what makes you think I want to go back? What the hell is there for me to go back to? He's probably dead now anyway," she added uncaringly, 'and if he's not, then he ought to be. Everyone over twenty-one should be dead. I certainly intend to be," she added broodingly. Claudia's heart missed a beat. She had already been warned by Janice that given her current lifestyle, Katriona was unlikely to live much longer, just as she had been warned about the danger of allowing herself to become too emotionally involved with any of her cases. Later that evening working at home, dutifully trying to fill in the empty blanks in Katriona's case history with the fragmented bits of information she had been given earlier, Claudia put down her pen and stared tiredly into space. She had a bruise on her arm where a young boy had tried to steal her bag as she left the flats, and there had been an unpleasant few seconds in one of the stairwells when another addict had tried to hassle her for money. If she was honest with her n self, she knew that she was finding the work depressing and exhausting and without the payback of feeling any satisfaction that she was actually doing anything positive. Today had been a bad day, she acknowledged as she rubbed her aching forehead. Katriona in particular, despite the rapport she felt she had established with her, or perhaps because of it, seemed to delight in deliberately trying to get under her skin, her barbed remarks designed, or so it sometimes seemed to Claudia, not just to nettle her but to actually inflict damage on her. Katriona was a formidably intelligent young woman and Claudia had no doubts whatsoever that her father had not been overly ambitious in wanting her to go up to Oxford. She knew what Janice was all too likely to say about the family background Katriona had supplied her with today; she would think that Katriona was likely to have made it up, that it was simply a clever fiction she had created around herself, but Claudia sensed that, for once, the girl had been telling the truth. As she started to write down the gist of their interview, Claudia paused to nibble on her pen and to ponder on the probable details of her life that Katriona had not revealed to her. That she had been intensely jealous of her father's dedication to his job and the pupils he taught had been patently obvious--and natural. The tragic death of her mother must have traumatically affected them both. It was easy to see why a shy, scholarly man already middle-aged might have retreated from his wife's death and its unfortunate consequences. Being left the sole parent to a young daughter, he more than likely found solace in his work. As a result, Katriona had undoubtedly tried to make him aware of her presence, her needs, by becoming difficult and rebellious, the classic situation of a child deciding that attention gained through bad behaviour was better than no attention at all. "So how old were you when you left home, Katriona?" Claudia had asked her casually, slipping in the question, but not apparently casually enough because Katriona had instantly been on guard, her response dagger sharp and instantaneous. "I was fourteen," she had replied, 'and I didn't leave. I was told to go. " When she saw the expression on Claudia's face, her mouth curled into a derisive smile. "You don't believe me. Well, it's true. I was given an ultimatum and so was my father. If he wanted to keep his job, then I had to go. My presence as a teenage girl was too disruptive to the boys for me to stay." She gave a small shrug. "Of course, my father could have chosen to live outside the school. I hated living there, anyway, but he liked the Hat we had. The rooms were elegant and classically designed. Sure they were, but rooms with ten-foot-high ceilings take some heating and the school wouldn't install central heating in the staff's quarters. My bedroom windows had ice on them in the winter, we could only have a bath after the boys had had theirs, the water was always cold. " She gave a small shiver. "It must have been hard for you Claudia had responded sympathetically. Katriona had made no response; the drug she had injected was clouding her mind, her ability to think. Claudia recognised the surly, mistrustful look entering her eye and knew that there was no point in questioning her any further. Fourteen. She sighed now before recommencing her writing. A child still, but the streets of London and far too many other large cities were home to runaways of that age and much younger--a sad fact she had good cause to know. "You shouldn't be working here," Janice had told her acerbically yet again only the other week. "You're more equipped for delivering meals on wheels in some pretty country village." "I'm fully qualified to do my job," Claudia had felt bound to remind her stiffly. "Academically, yes," Janice had agreed, her upper lip curling, 'but emotionally. " She had shaken her head vigorously. "No way, you're the sort who'll grit her teeth and pretend until the job gets too much for her and she cracks. Then we end up having to cope with her workload. You need to be tough to work in this environment. You need to understand what we're working with. Feeling sorry for them won't do it and the only way you can understand them is from living with them, from growing up alongside them--' " Like you did? " Claudia had interrupted her. "Like I did," Janice had agreed, adding grimly, 'face up to it, Claudia. There are some people who are never going to make it, who are born simply to die. There you see, I've shocked you, but it's the truth. They have no purpose, no future, no hope, nothing. " Claudia hadn't been able to make any response, the pain of what Janice was saying hurting her too much. It hurt now thinking about Katriona. She wasn't like that; like those whom Janice had described with such cruel accuracy. Katriona had the intelligence to make something of herself, of her life. If she would just agree to try a rehab programme, Claudia was sure she could be helped to see how much better her life could be. "She doesn't want to see," Janice had told her. "And the harder you try to persuade her, the more she'll dig her heels in. Katriona's sole mission in life is to degrade herself just as much as she possibly can. It's her way of punishing whoever it was in her life who hurt her. It gets some of them that way. Be careful, Claudia," she had warned her curtly. "She'll hurt you if she can-whatever way she can. She needs to hurt others nearly as much as she needs to hurt herself. " And Claudia had known that it was true. There had been several occasions when she had sensed a cruelty, a malevolence almost, about some of Katriona's comments to her, just as she had sensed the girl's angry determination to undermine and unsettle her, to denigrate and, if she could, destroy everything and everyone contra n dieting her own warped and destructive view on life. But understanding why Katriona behaved the way she did did not always lessen the efficacy of her bitingly cruel tongue, Claudia acknowledged ruefully. Claudia woke up, yawning and stretching, blinking in the dazzling glare of the oncoming headlights of other cars as Garth turned into their street. They had spent the weekend--his first off since his tour of duty in Northern Ireland--with Garth's parents, and after two late nights and Garth's mother's justly famed cordon bleu [محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]ng, Claudia had fallen asleep on the way home. It had been an enjoyable weekend--she got on well with Garth's parents, who had never made any secret of the fact that they welcomed her as a daughter-in-law--but Garth had been slightly on edge, not specifically with her, or indeed with anyone. It had been more as though he had been having difficulty in gearing down to everyday civilian life after a high-tension existence with his regiment. Not much mention had been made of his tour of duty at either of the two dinner parties his parents had given during their visit, but Claudia suspected that it would have been something that he and his father would have discussed when Garth had gone to join him in his study while Claudia helped his mother to prepare Sunday lunch. An old school friend of Garth's father had been present at the Friday evening dinner party. He ran his own PR business, his clients in the main drawn from the world of politics and high finance. Claudia had heard him telling Garth quite seriously that if he were to leave the army he would certainly be interested in having Garth come to work for him. "I don't know the first thing about public relations," Garth had said, laughing. "That's where you're wrong," Nicholas Forbes had corrected him immediately. "Through your work, you're promoting an image, and that in essence is what public relations work is all about. You're good with people. You know how to deal with them, how to work with them and bring out the best in them," he had continued, and as she listened to him, Claudia had realised that he had judged Garth's character very shrewdly and accurately indeed. She wondered if he knew through Garth's father that Garth was concerned about how much of a future he would actually have with the army now that he had a wife to consider. "It isn't that I'm fiercely ambitious," Garth had told his parents over lunch on Friday just after they had arrived and the four of them were seated around the comfortable kitchen table. "But one day, hopefully, I will have a family to support." He had smiled, giving Claudia a teasing glance, before adding more seriously, 'and besides, I don't want to be an absentee father. " What Garth wasn't saying to his parents, but what they had both agreed on, was that, unlike them, their own children were not going to be sent away to boarding school--an experience that neither of them had particularly enjoyed. While Garth brought in their cases and the boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables Garth's mother had insisted on giving them from her own kitchen garden, Claudia went over to the sink to fill the kettle. She heard Garth come in and close the door, and as she turned her head he came towards her, blocking her into the small space between the sink and his body. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and started to nuzzle the nape of her neck. "Garth," she protested, "I was just going to make some tea." "I don't want tea... I want you," Garth growled, tightening his hold on her, one hand covering her breast, the heat of his breath hot against her skin. When Garth had arrived home on Wednesday, they had had a passionately sensual and sexual reunion; on Thursday night, too, they had made love, and on Friday morning Garth had woken her with the slow suckle of his mouth on her breast. She had known instinctively that the urgency of his lovemaking and the intensity of his sexual desire for her were heightened by his recent tour of duty. Whenever he came home on leave, he was always hungry for physical contact with her; eager to make love and to make up for the time they had been apart. But this time, there had been a new sense of urgency, an edge not of aggression towards her but of some tautly controlled male emotion. Lying in bed next to him at his parents', profoundly thankful for the size of their house and the fact that their bedroom was the full length of the house away from his parents' room, Claudia had suddenly been acutely aware of how very fragile human life was. All the time Garth had been in Belfast, she had steadfastly refused to allow herself to dwell on the fears that she knew must be experienced by everyone for the safety of someone they loved when that someone was in a dangerous and hostile environment, telling herself that to give in to her fears, even subconsciously, might somehow or other weaken Garth and make him more vulnerable. But the first night he had been home, she had woken constantly in the night, reaching out to touch him just to reassure herself that he was actually there beside her and safe. She had not even objected when he had insisted on making love to her at his parents' home, something that normally made her feel acutely self-conscious and unable to completely relax. But her urge to be close to him, to be held by him, to be a part of him, had been so strong that it had overwhelmed her usual inhibitions. "Garth," she protested again, but already she could feel her body starting to respond to his touch, tiny shivers of delicious sensation quiver n ing across her skin where his mouth was caressing it. "Mrrun..." was the only response he made to her half-hearted protest. Against her body as he pressed closer to her she could feel the hard throb of his erection. The hand caressing her breast slipped inside her top, pushing away her bra while the other hand tugged at her skirt. "Garth, no," she told him breathlessly. "We can't, not here...." "Oh, yes, we can," he told her thickly in response, his hand already touching her body, caressing her sex, his own reacting to the hot, wet feel of her just as she was reacting to the hard male pressure of him. The musky aroused male scent of his body was making her feel dizzy just as he enveloped her. She could feel the hardness of his thigh pressing against her leg. She could hear the urgency in his voice as he started to move rhythmically against her. "Lean forward," she heard him instruct her. A fierce thrill of shocked excitement raced through her. She had never been particularly adventurous in bed and, compared with what one heard and read, her sex drive seemed nowhere near as high or as demanding as that of other women of her age, but suddenly, with Garth caressing her with his hand at the same time as he started to penetrate her with quick, fiercely hungry thrusts, to her own bemusement she found herself grinding her own body back against his, panting with a mixture of urgency and excitement as she started to quiver from head to foot with the onset of a need for him that was almost as intense and immediate as his for her. When his thrusts became slower and more deliberate, she moaned in taut feminine frustration, which elicited a hot, savage groan of excitement from Garth as he moved faster and deeper within her body, responding to the message of her demanding and wholly female body [محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]. When it came, her orgasm was so swift and so intense that for a few seconds Claudia actually felt as though she might pass out. When Garth withdrew from her, she was trembling so much that he instinctively wrapped his arms protectively around her, rocking her gently as he soothed her back down to earth. "Do you know what we're going to do now?" he whispered lovingly to her as he scooped her up in his arms. When Claudia shook her head, he told her huskily, "We're going to go to bed and I'm going to make love to you all over again, only this time... this time, it's going to last all night." "Garth..." Claudia began to protest and then stopped. She didn't even have the energy left to tell him they should rest never mind make love a second time. Only somehow or other she had found the energy and they did make love again, and it was only in the early hours of the morning, when she got up to go to the bathroom, that she suddenly realised what she had done or rather what she had not done. Her packet of oral contraceptive pills lay reproachfully on the vanity unit where she had left them by accident when she was packing to go to Garth's parents. Numbly, she stared at them. That was three pills she had missed taking. Three nights. three days when they had made love without using contraception. Her heart sank and then rallied. She had only missed three days. Surely she couldn't. surely that didn't. In the morning when she told Garth--before she would allow him to make love to her--he didn't seem anywhere near as concerned as she had expected. "So you might be pregnant. We are married," he reminded her wryly, 'and we were planning on having a family at some stage. " "Some stage, yes," Claudia agreed, 'but not yet, not here, not while I'm still working. We can't bring a baby up here in this flat. Garth," she told him, shaking her head and grimacing. "And we certainly can't afford to move somewhere else, not in London." "No," he agreed 'but would it really be so bad? " "They'll be furious at work," Claudia told him. "I know that Janice doesn't really think I'm up to the job as it is. She's never really approved of me." "I know how much being able to work means to you," Garth responded, 'but. " He paused and then put his arms around her, tucking her head under his chin so that she could hear the rumble of his voice in his chest and smell the early- morning man smell of him, something she had missed desperately the first few days after he returned to the regiment following his leave. Now, instinctively, she drew it deeply into her lungs to savour and treasure it for the time when she would be alone. "Are you really happy here... living and working in London?" Claudia opened her mouth to tell him that of course she was, but instead, she found herself shaking her head, her eyes filling with tears as she admitted tiredly, "No... not really. Perhaps Janice ;s right after all. Perhaps I'm simply not equipped to deal with the kind of problems I'm having to face. Perhaps all I'm fit for doing is delivering meals on wheels and opening village fetes." "Don't be silly," Garth reassured her gently. "There's just as much poverty and hardship in the country as there is in a city. It's just that it's a different kind of poverty and a different way of life." Three weeks after Garth's leave had ended, Claudia sat up in bed and promptly felt so acutely nauseous that she knew, even before the routine doctor's test had confirmed it, that she was pregnant. Even so, she waited until she had that confirmation before telling Garth. "It's bad news, I'm afraid," she told him as calmly as she could, the telephone receiver sticky in her hand as she tried to blink away her tears. "I'm pregnant. Garth. " As she listened to him asking if she was absolutely sure, Claudia guessed that he had to be as dismayed by the news as she was herself for all his reassuring comments before he went back off leave. It wasn't that she didn't want a child--a family--she did, they both did, but not yet, not until their lives and their marriage were more sturdily established. After she had said her goodbyes to Garth and replaced the receiver, she squeezed her eyes tightly closed and fought to suppress her tears. It isn't that I don't want you, she told her baby silently. It's just that this is too soon. I'm not ready. We're not ready. Why, oh why hadn't she remembered to take those wretched pills? Tiredly, she looked round their small cramped flat. It was completely impossible for them to bring up a baby here--even if the landlord would allow it, but she already knew he would not. And then there was her job. Janice had remarked earlier on her pallor and noticeable lethargy. The work she was doing was both physically and emotionally demanding, their department too busy to have any room to carry someone who wasn't up to working at optimum output. There would be those, she knew, Janice among them, who no matter what they said publicly would privately believe that she was using her unexpected pregnancy as a cop-out, a way to save face, which would allow her to leave a job she simply wasn't up to. But she was up to it, she defended herself fiercely. It was just that as yet she hadn't mastered the art of detaching herself enough emotionally from the people she was dealing with. "You're too involved," Janice had warned her again only the other evening when she found Claudia folding some old blankets into the boot of her car. Having coaxed them out of her own and Garth's mother, Claudia intended to give them to the growing group of homeless vagrants who took [محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]ter every evening under the disused railway arches that Claudia passed on her way home. "They won't thank you for playing Lady Bountiful," Janice had warned her once she had cross-questioned Claudia on what she was doing. "I don't want their thanks," Claudia had returned quietly, ignoring the older woman's taunt. Tiredly, Claudia pushed away the keyboard on which she had just been finishing up a report. The clock on the wall showed that it was just gone six o'clock. Most of the other staff had already left, although it wasn't unusual for any of them to work into the evening. Claudia was so exhausted it almost made her feel sick. Even the effort of pushing her chair back and standing up made her grit her teeth. Why on earth should carrying a baby, so small as yet that it scarcely qualified for the term, so small, in fact, that she, its mother, had actually lost weight rather than gained it, demand such an intense concentration of energy that it left her as physically depleted as though she had climbed Everest? Wryly, she made her way back to the spot where she had parked her small car and unlocked it. Ten minutes later as she let herself into the hallway of the flat, she looked at the stairs in dejection and then slowly started to climb them. By the time she had reached the flat, she felt sick and dizzy. As she put down the shopping she had collected during her lunch hour, she opened her bag for her key. Suddenly, the flat door opened and Garth was standing there. "Garth." She blinked at him stupidly. "What are you doing here?" "I live here," he told her cheerfully. Then with a grin, he reached out and plucked her off the floor, swinging her up into his arms. "I managed to wangle a twenty-four-hour pass," he explained. "You sounded so fed up on the phone that I-Hey... what on earth are those for?" he demanded gently as she started to cry. "I'm sorry... I don't know..." Claudia sobbed, then added between hiccuping tears, "Yes, I do. I'm frightened. Garth. I'm not ready for this. We didn't plan--' She didn't get any further because he was holding her tight, kissing her forehead and then her mouth before telling her with loving firmness, " Now you listen to me. Everything's going to be fine. We may not have planned for this to happen quite so soon, but now that it has. " He paused and when Claudia looked uncertainly into his eyes, he told her softly, " I love you so much, Clo. -even more than ever now if that's possible. I love you both," he said passionately, placing one hand possessively on her stomach, then adding teasingly, 'and if it turns out to be a boy, I think we'll call him Hector." "Hector? No... never," Claudia objected, outraged, asserting determinedly, "Anyway, he, it... is going to be a girl." Her laughter faded quickly, though, as she shook her head and protested, "You really shouldn't have come home." She knew how difficult it was for him to get extra leave, but Garth stopped her. "I wanted to be here with you, with you both, and anyway... let's have a cup of tea and then we can talk," he suggested. "You go and sit down. I'll make it ... you look whacked." Claudia tried to smile but it was a distinctly wobbly attempt. Five minutes later as they sat cuddled up together on their small sofa. Garth told her quietly, "I've decided to leave the army just as soon as it can be arranged." "Oh, Garth," Claudia protested. "I know we've been talking about it, but not yet. You--' " All right, yes, perhaps I will be leaving sooner than I'd planned," Garth agreed, 'but that doesn't matter. I'm going to give Nick Forbes a ring and see if he was genuine about that offer of a job. I think on balance that he was." "Oh, Garth." "Look, this baby is as much my responsibility as yours, probably more," Garth told her ruefully, thinking about the weekend the baby had been conceived. The tour of Northern Ireland had been even more stressful than he had expected and the release of tension had caused a sexual urgency to burgeon within him, had sparked such a need to be alive so that perhaps in some ways it was inevitable that the creation of a new life should be the result. There had been such a fear of death on that tour that it would have been extraordinary if they had not been affected by it and by the sense of having escaped from underneath its weighty, oppressive shadow with the need to celebrate life. He could understand now why those who had completed several tours there said they got to a state where they felt they were involved in a macabre game of Russian roulette, wondering with each fresh tour if this would be the one from which their return would be in a wooden box. But he made no mention of any of this to Claudia. They had, of course, talked about the fact that he was a serving soldier. She knew the risks--she was, after all, a soldier's daughter. But he could see quite clearly how vulnerable the pregnancy had already made her--had heard it in her voice when she had rung him with the news. His first instinct was to protect her and the new life they had created together, and so far as he was concerned the best place, the only place, for him now was at her side. He would leave the army and hopefully get a job with his father's old school friend; they would buy a house in the country but within commuting distance of the city. The future, if not rosy, certainly looked reasonably bright. In his arms, Claudia started to relax. You've changed. There's something different about you. What is it? " Claudia sucked in her breath sharply as Katriona fired the fierce questions at her. Surprisingly for someone with the extent of the drug habit that Katriona possessed, she could be very intuitive as Claudia was quickly learning. "Nothing..." Claudia began, only to instinctively place her hand protectively across her belly as the youth who had been lying in the corner of the room on a piece of filthy sacking got to his feet and started to lurch towards her. "Leave off, Oz/ Katriona told him. "She's my probation officer not a supplier." To Claudia's relief, the youth turned away from her, stumbling towards the stairs instead, pausing to retch nauseously in the doorway as he did so. "He took a bad trip last night," Katriona told her emotionlessly, shrugging her shoulders dismissively as he clattered down the stairs. "He won't be around much longer." Graphically, she drew a line across her throat and then laughed when she saw Claudia's expression. "I suppose you think the same thing about me, don't you? Don't you? " she demanded, her earlier good humour giving way to sullen anger. Her lightning changes of mood were as much part of her personality as her drug habit, Claudia observed, responding to her quietly. "Katriona " You're pregnant, aren't you. aren't you? " Katriona suddenly demanded wildly, ignoring Claudia's attempt to talk objectively to her. "How does he like that, your fine army husband? I bet he's not too pleased. They never are " As a matter of fact. Garth is delighted," Claudia interrupted her sharply, then realised her mistake. She could see from Katriona's triumphant expression that she knew she had got under Claudia's professional guard. "Garth," the girl mimicked mockingly. "So Garth's delighted, is he? Well, aren't you the lucky one. I got pregnant once. The father wasn't delighted. He told me to get rid of it. " She heard the betraying sound Claudia made and laughed. "There wasn't any need in the end. I lost it, didn't I? Just as well. Not that the likes of you would ever know anything about that. Planned it all beforehand, had you? What did you say to him? Come on, darling Garth, please fuck me now so that I can get pregnant and then I won't have to go and see that dreadful Katriona any longer. Of course, your baby will have every thing, won't it? A delighted mummy and daddy. everything of the best. I expect Mummy is getting the christening robe down from the at tic already, isn't she? The same one that you wore when you were christened, the same one she wore. " Claudia saw the bitter resentment clouding Katriona's eyes as she mocked her. The girl's anger and jealousy were so intense Claudia could almost feel and taste them. For the first time in Katriona's presence, she felt a sharp thrill of fear--not for herself but for the baby, and for the first time since she had discovered she was pregnant, she felt the deep stirrings of real maternal love, the maternal instinct to protect her unborn child. For the first time, she realised how much she did want her baby. Their baby, hers and Garth's. "Have you thought any more about this rehab programme?" she asked Katriona firmly, ignoring the girl's taunts. She wasn't three months pregnant yet, but just as soon as she was, she intended officially to tell them at work she would be leaving. Garth had approached Nick Forbes, who confirmed that he meant every word he had said about wanting to employ him; and he had even mentioned a salary that far exceeded anything Garth had hoped for. "With that, we'll be able to afford to buy something pretty decent as long as we look outside London," Garth had told Claudia enthusiastically. Both sets of parents had been given the news that hopefully they were to become grandparents and they had responded with natural excitement and enthusiasm. They were an extremely fortunate young couple as Claudia was the first to acknowledge. Garth was going to be a wonderful father. His reaction to her unplanned pregnancy was showing her a side of him that made her love him all the more deeply--and allowed her to show her love for him all the more uninhibitedly. "Being pregnant suits you he had told her one night after they made love. "It makes you very sexy." "You don't think we might have harmed the baby, do you?" Claudia had asked him in some alarm, the darkness hiding her blushes as she acknowledged that her response to him had been more passionate and intense, more womanly, as though her pregnancy somehow conferred on her a new and more sultry adult status. "No way," Garth had reassured her, adding softly, "After all, that's how he or she got there in the first place, isn't it?" Cupping the back of her head with his hand, he very slowly drew her down towards him until she could feel the warmth of his breath against her skin. "Have I told you lately how much I love you and how very sexy you are like this?" he asked her in a whisper as his free hand stroked the curves of her body. "I'm going to get fat," Claudia protested. "You're going to get sexy. You are sexy," Garth corrected her. "It's fashionable to be thin," Claudia reminded him. "All the models--' "All the models are bags of bones," Garth told her extravagantly. "They can't hold a candle to you. Being pregnant suits you." As he bent his head to kiss her, Claudia relaxed into his embrace. During her lunch hour earlier in the week, she had been tempted into a store special ising in baby things. Garth had already insisted that he wanted an old-fashioned, easy-to-steer, as he put it, traditional coach-built pram. "For when I take him out on a Sunday morning while you're preparing lunch," he had told her teasingly. Claudia had laughed back. Now that she was over the initial shock of her pregnancy, she was as thrilled at the prospect of becoming a mother as Garth was a father. It was, after all, what she had always wanted. Having children, a family, for her was a very important part of what being married was all about and she could now understand and accept far more reasonably the words of one of her tutors that she had taken as criticism. "Your maternal streak is very strong," he had cautioned her, 'and you'll have to guard against letting it take control and lead you into making incorrect assessments of situations. "Mothers tend to be notoriously blind to the faults of their offspring." "I'm due to see the CO soon," Garth told her. Hearing the tension in his voice, Claudia raised her head and looked anxiously at him. "Are you sure this is what you want to do, leave the regiment?" she asked him. "I know I said that I didn't want our children to be army brats like I was, but. " "No, I feel exactly the same as you do. If I'm honest, one of the main reasons I went into the army was because I didn't really have any stronger idea of what I wanted to do. After going through public school and then university, I suspect that, psychologically, it felt safer opting for a career that echoed the same familiar, organised type of routine." Gravely, Claudia nodded her head. "It does tend to make you feel slightly institutionalised, our kind of education," she admitted. "Institutionalised!" Garth gave her a wry look. "Oh, thanks. Once I've spoken to the CO, though, we're going to have to get busy thinking about where we're going to live." "Somewhere in the country," Claudia suggested promptly. "I'll be working in London," he reminded her, 'but, yes, I agree. And preferably somewhere with a bit of land, close enough for both sets of parents to visit, but not too close. " "No, not too close," Claudia concurred. "I'll start making enquiries with a few estate agents, shall I?" "Mmm..." Garth agreed, nuzzling the delicate and so sensually responsive spot just behind her ear. "But remember to tell them we want plenty of bedrooms." "For when we have people to stay? Whom are you planning to invite, the whole regiment?" Claudia teased him. "No, not for guests," Garth returned before warning her huskily, "You don't think we're going to stop at this one, do you? Not now I know how easy it is--and how enjoyable. Do you know... you actually felt different the night this--' his hand covered her stomach '--happened?" "Garth," Claudia protested, "I forgot to take my pill for three nights and--' " No," Garth interrupted, shaking his head. "I know exactly when it was--it was the evening we came back from my parents, when I... when we--' " You were very deep inside me that time," Claudia broke in, her voice as husky with emotion as his. "Very deep," Garth agreed, adding as he drew her fully into his arms, "God, but we're lucky." *******edly, Claudia snuggled up against him. She couldn't imagine being any happier than she was right now, but instinctively she knew that she would be, once their baby was born. A feeling of such intense excitement and joy welled up inside her that it made her wriggle slightly against Garth, an expression of sheer bliss illuminating her face. "Now, what brought that on?" Garth asked her. He moved against her and she felt the hardness of his arousal. "This...?" he added hopefully. "No, not that," Claudia answered truthfully. "I was thinking about the baby. Oh, Garth, I'm so happy ... we're so lucky..." "Mmm.. / Garth agreed, reaching for her hand and placing it firmly against his body. /MmrnL . Isee. " Having come to the end of his speech informing the colonel that he intended to leave the regiment, Garth watched as his commanding officer stood up and went to stand in front of the window, hands clasped behind his back. A tall, spare man in his fifties, the colonel came from a long line of military men, but even he was not completely immune to the cultural changes taking place in the current decade. His own son, ex-Eton and destined to follow him into the regiment, had decided that he preferred to travel to India and sit at the feet of some guru. There had been arguments about it, of course, but nothing could persuade the boy to change his mind. The boy, in his father's opinion, looked more like a girl with his long hair and peculiar clothes, and the colonel wasn't alone. Only the previous week he had been with a fellow Etonian whose own son had been due to follow him into the Guards; instead, the boy had joined a pop group. "The regiment will be sorry to lose you," he told Garth, turning to face him and adding, 'and so shall I. " Silently, Garth expelled his pent-up breath. It was no secret in the regiment that the CO had been a bit sticky recently. Word had it that the disappointment he had suffered over his son had put a distinctly sharp edge to his always somewhat choleric temper. But he was a fair man, honest and just, and Garth liked and respected him. "I'd like to leave before the baby arrives," Garth requested. The regiment was due to be home based for the following six months, which would allow him to take sufficient leave to sort out his and Claudia's house move and it made sense to Garth that he would have at least a couple of months to settle into his new professional life before their son or daughter arrived, and it was for that reason as he told the colonel that he had hoped to quit the regiment in three months' time. "I don't see any reason why not. You're coming to the end of your term with us and we can't force you into signing on for a further period of time," the colonel remarked. It was a matter of honour for Garth, both as an individual and as a soldier aware of his rank, not to leave when the regiment was about to be posted overseas or sent into the field. He was only glad that the regiment was not due for another tour of duty in Northern Ireland for some time--not so much for the danger that this entailed, at least not for himself. No, it was Claudia he was thinking of. She had dealt calmly and practically with his recent tour of duty in Belfast, but even so he had sensed her anxiety and concern and he knew how much greater that would be now that she was carrying their child. After she was over the first shock of discovering her pregnancy, he could see how much her forthcoming role as a mother thrilled and delighted her. It wasn't just her body that had ma and Betray 173 tured, ripened with the conception of their child. Claudia herself had grown, too. Some women seemed by nature more maternal, more nurturing and caring, more suited perhaps to be mothers than others and Claudia was most definitely one of them. Even now. Garth sensed that their child, once it had arrived, would automatically lay claim to Claudia's loyalty and love--and she would bestow these un stintingly--but he didn't see any reason to feel threatened or dismayed by the idea. Why should he? He, too, shared Claudia's joy, enjoyed the glow of fulfilment that prospective motherhood had brought her. Claudia had never felt happier. She hadn't told them officially at work yet that she would be handing in her notice, but she suspected that they must know. Not even Katriona's acid sniping had the power to affect her any more. She had even suggested to the girl that since she seemed to have nothing but criticism for the way Claudia was handling her case, she might prefer to be dealt with by someone else, but Katriona, who seemed to have developed a love-hate relationship with her, flatly refused, flying off the handle and accusing Claudia of wanting to walk out on her and not having time for her any more now that she was pregnant. The time would come, of course, when Claudia would have to hand over the case to someone else, but at the back of Claudia's mind was the knowledge that despite her ferocity, de n spite the fact that Claudia knew that Katriona deliberately tried to needle and upset her, the girl was very vulnerable. Claudia didn't want to be yet another person who had turned her back on her, and besides. Furiously though she might deny it, Katriona was becoming increasingly dependent on drugs--and increasingly at risk physically. "She'll be dead within a year," Janice had remarked brutally the last time she had accompanied Claudia on a visit to the squat. "You mark my words. I've seen it happen with her type before. For a long time, they seem to be able to withstand the abuse they're subjecting their bodies to, and then suddenly, they're gone." Claudia's footsteps quickened as she hurried down the street. She had a lunch appointment with one of the estate agents in the city who also had branches in the country. A happy smile curled her mouth. Garth had warned her that they wouldn't be able to afford anything grand, but something grand wasn't what she wanted. What she wanted was a house that would be a proper home, a house with a large, comfortable kitchen and a big garden for their children to play in. Their children. Blissfully, she closed her eyes. She was just so. so. happy. Even her morning sickness brought its own peculiar sense of pleasure, reaffirming as it did the reality of her pregnancy. What she felt was impossible to describe or explain. What she felt was a sense of . of rightness, of completeness, of fulfilment. What she knew was that the prospect of motherhood made her feel that she had suddenly discovered the true purpose of her life. She loved Garth, of course, but instinctively she knew that the love she would have for their children would be the strongest and most powerful emotion she would ever know. Bleakly, Garth stared out across the silent barracks yard. It was a good hour since they had heard the news, a shock that still hadn't fully sunk in. The enduring conflict in Northern Ireland had claimed many lives, both Catholic and Protestant, and now another tragedy had occurred. A coach load of British soldiers on their way to their depot had been ambushed on an isolated Northern Irish road. Out of the fifty-odd men travelling in the coach, there had been only eight survivors, and all of them so badly maimed that even if they survived. Impossible not to suffer that churning stab of dread to the stomach coupled with a guilty relief that it was not oneself lying dead on that country road or, even worse, lying on a hospital bed with what was left of one's shattered and destroyed body. It would take much more of a miracle than modern medicine could provide to piece back together a body whose limbs had been blown off. He hadn't known personally any member of that other regiment but that didn't matter. They might have their regimental rivalries and jealousies, but underneath them, they were all army. They were all vulnerable; it could have been any of them. "They'll have to bring back the rest of the regiment now," one of the other officers had commented to Garth when the news had broken. "They can't leave them out there after this. It would be bad for morale. Heaven help whoever they send out to take their place. I hope to God it isn't us. Anything like this makes the men damned jittery and that's when. " He didn't say any more. He didn't need to. Garth was aware of the psychology of good morale as any other responsible and intelligent officer. "You don't think we will be sent out in replacement, do you?" he asked instead, frowning at the prospect. "Hard to say. We've got the training and the experience, but it isn't that long since we completed our last tour of duty." Garth frowned again, recalling their conversation. In a matter of weeks he would be leaving the regiment, his intention being to view some of the houses Claudia had weeded out of the possibilities sent to her by the estate agents and then spend some time getting to know the ropes of his new job before the birth of their baby. Claudia was now four months pregnant but her stomach was not yet beginning to show. Garth's frown changed to a smile as he remembered how the last time he had been on leave she had proudly showed him the maternity clothes she had bought. He hoped they weren't being sent out to Northern Ireland. If they were, he would feel honour bound to go. "But... but you said that you weren't due to do another tour in Northern Ireland," Claudia faltered as they sat side by side on their small sofa. When Garth had telephoned to say he was coming home unexpectedly, her first thought was that now he could come with her to see the pram she was thinking of ordering; the very last thing on her mind was that he would have the kind of news for her that he had just given her. "We weren't," he agreed quietly. "But there's been a change of plan." No need to remind her of the month-old tragedy that was now, in media terms at least, stale news, but Claudia wasn't an army daughter for nothing. "It's because of the bombing, isn't it?" she guessed immediately. "They're sending you out because they've had to recall that regiment." "Yes," Garth replied, his tone sombre. "Oh, Garth, but surely you don't need to go. You've only got a few weeks left and--' " You know better than that, Clo/ Garth reminded her. "I can't let the men down, and if I don't go..." "Yes, I know," she conceded heavily. Northern Ireland. Claudia shivered with foreboding. Every army wife dreaded hearing the news that her husband's regiment had been posted there, but normally Claudia would have tried her best to keep her fears to herself. This time, though, it was different. This time. She forced herself not to break down completely and beg Garth not to go, remind him that it wasn't just her he had to consider now. But Garth it seemed had read her mind. "I know what you must be thinking," he told her gently, 'and don't think I haven't thought it, too, but this is something I have to do, Clo. " Numbly, she nodded her reluctant agreement, swallowing hard before asking him, "When... when do you leave?" "The end of next week." Claudia closed her eyes. That night after they had made love, instead of turning over to lie on her side as she normally did, she remained curled up against Garth, clinging to him even in her sleep, afraid to let him go. "Look, darling, why don't you come to us for the weekend?" Claudia's mother suggested when her daughter telephoned her to tell her the news. "We could do some shopping together for the baby." Claudia agreed, and Garth, when she told him about the invitation, was pleased that she would have something to help take her mind off worrying about him. |
IT'S WONDERFUL , PLEAS FINISH IT SOON
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Thanks dear, will try to finish it soon |
Garth's regiment was scheduled to leave for Northern Ireland on Friday afternoon. On Friday morning, Claudia went to check on Katriona, but her anxiety over Garth made it hard for her to concentrate fully on the girl, a fact that Katriona very quickly picked up on. At first, she accused Claudia of not paying any attention to her and then when that didn't provoke Claudia's normal concerned response, she demanded tauntingly, "What is it? Not had a row with darling, wonderful Garth, have we?" "Nothing's happened," Claudia denied, 'and we have not had a row. " "Oh, coming home this weekend, is he?" Katriona mocked her. "No, he isn't," Claudia returned shortly. "Oh, poor you, you'll be all on your own," Katriona mocked her. "No, as a matter of fact, I shan't. I'm going to see my parents," Claudia told her. What time was it? Would Garth have left yet, or would she just have time to ring him before he did? If she could only manage to get away from Katriona. What time was it anyway? She glanced at her wrist and then remembered that she wasn't wearing her watch. She had put it in her handbag because the strap had broken. Unfastening her bag, she reached inside, unaware of the furiously resentful and bitter expression in Katriona's eyes as she realised that Claudia wasn't really listening to her. Smug bitch. who did she think she was anyway? What made her think she was so special . so wonderful? A scuffle broke out in the corridor outside Katriona's room, and while Claudia's attention was distracted, Katriona reached forward and deftly removed the keys she could see gleaming in Claudia's handbag. By the time Claudia looked back, Katriona had the keys tucked safely away out of sight. It gave her a sense of triumph and power to have taken them and gleefully she imagined Claudia's reaction when she discovered they were gone. Served her right. Katriona fingered the keys she had tucked beneath her skirt. What did the flat she shared with her precious Garth look like? Katriona already knew where it was; she had sneaked a look at Claudia's driving licence one day when Claudia's attention had been distracted and it had been easy enough for her to memo rise it. And now she had the keys, and Claudia didn't even know. An hour before Garth's regiment was due to leave, one of the men was found hanging in his room. He had taken his own life rather than face the fear of what the next few months might hold. It was impossible to keep it a secret, of course, and just as impossible to allow the regiment to go. Rearrangements were hastily made to find a substitute regiment to send out in Garth's regiment's place. "Look, why don't you go home and see your wife?" Garth's commanding officer suggested. "There's nothing any of us can do here now. There'll have to be an enquiry, naturally. Not that we need one to tell us that the poor sod was so shit scared of suffering the same fate as the men he would be replacing, that he chose to take his own life rather than let some bomber do it for him. " Numbly, Garth did as he suggested. He hadn't wanted this particular assignment, but to be reprieved from going by something like this. As he drove towards London, he tried to imagine what the young squaddie must have gone through in those last hours before he had decided to take his own life. Why hadn't any of them realised. guessed. Garth could picture the boy now. Tow-headed, tall, his body still possessing the angularity of youth. He had been a quiet lad, almost inarticulate, and the others had ribbed him a bit because he had a stammer. Well, they wouldn't be ribbing him any longer. Furiously, Garth punched the car horn when another driver cut in front of him. Suddenly, he couldn't wait to get home to Claudia. It was only when he parked the car outside the flat that he remembered that Claudia wouldn't be there. Grim-faced, he unlocked the door to the flat, and without even bothering to take off his coat, he opened the cupboard and removed the bottle of whisky his father had given him the last time they visited. Garth had never been a heavy drinker, but right now he felt the need for a good stiff drink. for several good stiff drinks. He was halfway down the bottle before it struck him that he ought to have something to eat, but Claudia, good housewife that she was, had carefully cleaned out the fridge before she left. The whisky had begun to take effect, and although he found a tin of baked beans. Garth could only stare owlishly at it while he wondered vaguely where the tin-opener was kept. In the end, it seemed easier to simply pour himself another drink. That poor little sod. Garth put his hand to his own neck and rubbed it as though he could actually feel the rope tightening round his own flesh, choking the life out of him. He was getting very drunk, he recognised. Perhaps he ought to go to bed. He was, after all, soon to be a father. Unlike the lad who had done away with himself this morning. He would never be a father, but he had had a father. How had he felt when they had broken the news to him? How would he feel if anyone ever had to tell him that his son, his very own child, had committed suicide? Garth paused in the act of undressing to pour himself another drink. He had been the first officer on the scene, summoned there by the private who had found the body. He had seen death before, but this had been different. Garth filled up another glass before dragging off the rest of his clothes, which he left lying where they fell before crawling into bed and spilling some of his whisky on the bedclothes as he did so. God, but he wished that Claudia was here with him. That poor little sod. His face felt damp, but it was only when he raised his hand to touch his skin that he realised that he was crying. Gloatingly, Katriona fingered Claudia's keys. Had she missed them yet? Had she guessed where they were? Katriona doubted it; she had been too busy thinking about her damn bloody husband and her bloody baby to notice what Katriona was doing. Bloody, bloody baby. For a moment, Katriona was tempted to hurl the keys through the open window of her room, but then she stopped herself, gripping them tightly as she brooded on Claudia's shortcomings. She was the one Claudia was supposed to be concentrating on. She was the one who needed help. who needed her. That Claudia thought she was so clever, so secure in her precious little world. Bitch. Katriona hated her . hated her. The drug she had injected earlier was starting to wear off. It wore off frighteningly quickly these days, or at least it would have been frightening if Katriona was the type of person to allow herself to be frightened, which she wasn't. She wasn't frightened of anything or anyone. Not the punters who paid her for their inept use of her body; not the pimps who tried to threaten her and make her work for them; not even the dealers who supplied her with drugs. And if she wasn't afraid of them, she most certainly wasn't afraid of someone like "Miss Smarty-pants." It was pathetic, really, the way she doted on that husband of hers, the way she believed in him. All men were shits, Katriona knew that. Given half a chance, no, less than half a chance, he'd be just like all the rest, led by his balls and not his brains. Katriona fingered the keys again. Her dealer had recently put up the cost of supply; he knew n how desperate she was for her fix now. He was trying to trick her, to trap her into giving in to the pimp who was persuading her to work for him, telling her that she needed his protection, that he could guarantee her an income for her habit, that if she worked for him she would never need to worry again about finding her own punters. Balls, she didn't worry about rinding them now. Why should she? She would have to go out working tonight. She frowned as she studied Claudia's keys, remembering that Claudia had said she was going to be away for the weekend. Which meant that the flat would be empty. which meant. Unsteadily, Katriona got to her feet. "Where are you going?" one of the other girls yelled out after her as she staggered down the stairs. "It's too early yet to go out looking for business." "Mind your own," Katriona snarled viciously at her as she opened the flat door and blinked in the sharp, clear, late-afternoon daylight. By the time Katriona had made her torturous way to Claudia and Garth's flat, it had already gone dark, the air crisp with the scent of autumn, haunting and sharply nostalgic, but Katriona wasn't aware of the acrid smell of wood smoke and burning leaves that hung on the evening air. A wide, triumphant grin curled her mouth as she found the house she was looking for. Luckily, the lobby was empty when she walked in. The craving for her next fix, which had been nothing more than a background irritation when she set out, had now become a savage, sharp-toothed, drilling pain. When she tried to insert Claudia's key into the door lock, her hand was shaking so much it took her several attempts to do so but eventually she succeeded. She turned the handle and the door swung open. Marching aggressively into the small hallway, she almost stumbled over the kit bag that Garth had dropped there on his way in. Once she had found the light switch and discovered what the obstacle was, she stared at it warily for several seconds, straining her ears for any sound from within the flat. Hearing nothing, she bent down and quickly started to rifle through the bag, discarding Garth's neatly rolled and folded clothes as she did so, then sitting back on her heels and grimacing in disgust when she didn't discover any money or anything else of value she could sell. There was a mirror in the hallway set over a small [محذوف][محذوف][محذوف][محذوف]f, both wedding presents from one of Garth's relatives, and Katriona paused to peek into it, making a series of gargoyle-like, simpering faces at her reflection as she pretended to ape the way she imagined Claudia would check her own appearance. Claudia. Bitch. She deserved this. She had no right to go off and leave Katriona on her own. She had no right to have a bloody baby. Automatically, Katriona started to rub and then scratch at her arms, which were already itching, her skin crawling from the effects of withdrawal. Angrily, she made her way into the sitting room. She needed money and Claudia was the sort of silly bitch who would have some hidden away somewhere, probably in her knicker drawer. She was that sort, Katriona decided savagely. The sitting room was empty and Katriona scowled as she studied the clock on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. Too heavy and awkward to carry, she decided in disgust, just like the other pieces of silver and the old-fashioned china figurines that decorated the highly polished sofa table and filled the pretty mahogany cabinet standing against the wall behind it. The figures were Dresden, eighteenth century and highly saleable, and the silver had been handed down through four generations of both Garth's and Claudia's families, but it was money that Katriona wanted money. Grimacing in disgust, she ignored the kitchen in favour of the bedroom. She might just as well have gone out onto the street; at least by now she'd have had a couple of punters and twenty pounds or so to show for it. She pushed open the bedroom door and then rocked back on her heels, her body stiffening in shock as she saw Garth sprawled out completely naked across the bed, the virtually empty bottle of whisky and glass at his side. Instinct told her to leave, but overriding this instinct was a sharply savage surge of dangerous excitement. Here was Claudia's husband, Mr. Perfect. the father of the child she was carrying. The man who was all the things that all the men who had passed through Katriona's life were not. Stealthily, she approached the bed. She knew a dead-drunk man when she saw one; after all, she had seen enough of them. There was no way he was going to wake up this side of tomorrow morning, at least not without a considerable amount of help. A triumphant grin split Katriona's face, suddenly making her look much younger, as young, in fact, as she actually was. She reached for Garth's hand and gripped his fingers. Nothing, no response. She lifted his arm and then let it drop. Still nothing, mterestedly, she studied his body. Not bad. He had good long legs, a well-muscled torso, a flat stomach and. Without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, she moved even closer to the bed and studied his sex, even reaching out and prodding it ungently. Hmm . not the largest man she had ever seen, but he could certainly claim to be reasonably well-endowed--and much more so than the majority of men with whom Katriona had had to deal. No, perhaps Miss Sly Boots Claudia wasn't as prissy as she liked to make out after all. That is, if her precious Garth knew what to do with it and if he wasn't just the shove-it-in, move-it-up and-down, take-it-out type and--even more unlikely, she decided unkindly--if Claudia herself knew how to take advantage of what nature had given him, which she doubted. She was definitely the 'lie there and think of England' type. Katriona could just imagine her reaction if she walked in now. How shocked and disgusted she would be when she saw her precious husband sprawled stark bollock naked across their bed, very obviously drunk. And how much more shocked she would be if she were to walk in and find Katriona herself straddled across him, riding that interestingly sized cock, while he begged for more and told her he was having a better time rucking her than fucking his wife. They all did. After all, that was why they paid her for sex when most of them could have had it for free at home. Experimentally, Katriona climbed onto the bed. If she turned her head, she could see her're flection in the mirror and anyone coming in now would have a perfectly clear view of her backside as she rode up and down on Garth's prick. Her grin widened as she imagined Claudia's reaction again. She wouldn't be so calm, so distant, so sure of herself and in control then, would she? No, she, Katriona, would be the one in control, the one making her dependent on her goodwill. Almost absently, Katriona started to remove her clothes, although, unlike Garth, she didn't scatter them all over the room but folded them neatly on the floor instead. Then she glanced to wards the neat dressing-table and saw a single small vial of scent. On impulse, she climbed off the bed and went to pick it up, then dabbed it generously on her body, especially her breasts and just above her sex. And then still smiling, she climbed back onto the bed. Only this time when she straddled Garth and reached for him, instead of simply touching his penis briefly, she squeezed it between her fingers. m his drunken sleep. Garth jerked and frowned, mumbling something but not waking up. Katriona pinched him much harder a second time. With a roar of protest. Garth awakened and tried to sit up, but Katriona was too quick for him, leaning forward over him so that his face became entangled in the thick length of her hair, her body pressed tight against him as she commanded huskily, "Put it in me. Garth, put it in now.7 Still drunk and totally confused. Garth tried to respond to the warning message his brain was sending him, but it was impossible for him to clear the fog of alcohol and sleep clouding his thought processes. Above him, Katriona reached down and took him in her hand, firmly massaging him to erect thickness at the same time as she pushed her breasts towards his mouth and commanded fiercely, "Suck." Instinctively, Garth opened his mouth. Somewhere at the back of his mind, a sharp, shrill alarm bell sounded but he couldn't hear it, couldn't hang on to the brief recognition that this breast, this dark pointed nipple did not belong to Claudia, that Claudia would never do what this girl was doing. never command, demand, as she was doing. But how, after all, could it not be Claudia? Claudia was his wife. This was their home, their bedroom, their bed. Still, even if the last thing he felt like now was sex, his body. Reluctantly, sluggishly. Garth's body responded to Katriona's expert ministrations. She was the one who was the aggressor, he the passive recipient of her attentions. She was the one who held him rigid while she slid onto the hard shaft she had brought into existence, holding him with her muscles as she growled triumphantly deep in her throat. What do you think of him now, your wonderful husband? she crowed mentally to Claudia as she pumped vigorously up and down on Garth, half-smothering him, making sure that her hair and the pillow were making it impossible for him to actually see her while she rode him as exultantly as any Valkyrie. Technically, it wasn't possible for a woman to rape a man, at least not in the act of normal sexual intercourse, and if Claudia were to walk in now, she would never believe that Garth hadn't instigated the apparently passionate sex that was taking place between them. "Yes, come on, fuck me," Katriona purred. "Fuck me really hard, really, really hard." Garth was vaguely aware of her verbal demands but it was to the message that his body was giving him that he was really responding, answering the primal, primitive call that was as ancient as the human race. Gripping Katriona's wrist, he started to thrust up into her, ignoring the pain in his head and the distant awareness that something wasn't right, that she didn't feel right, that she didn't sound right. that she just wasn't right. Katriona felt him grow more rigid just before he released himself inside her with an explosive surge. Smiling to herself, she let him slide away from her. When would Claudia be coming home? In the morning. just in time to discover her. Katriona, snuggled up in bed with her husband. Still smiling, Katriona reached for the bedclothes and lay down beside Garth. You're sure you're feeling well enough to drive back to London on your own? You could leave your car and Daddy--' "I'm fine," Claudia assured her mother. "It's just this wretched morning sickness." "I was the same her mother admitted, adding comfortingly, but it should stop soon." "I hope so," Claudia returned. She was well into her pregnancy now but the weight she had lost along with her appetite meant that her pregnancy didn't show very much yet and she certainly looked far from the bloomingly healthy picture a pregnant woman was supposed to present. She already had a short list of houses to see, although with Garth in Northern Ireland he wouldn't be able to go with her as they had planned. Garth. A sharp tremor of anxiety tensed her already queasy stomach. What was he doing now? Was he safe? Was he. It was almost lunch-time before she finally got in her car and set off for London, but it wasn't until she stopped to fill the tank with petrol that she realised she hadn't got her flat keys. "Damn," she swore as she quickly tipped out the entire *******s of her handbag to go carefully through them. She tried to remember when she had last seen her keys but couldn't. Another facet of her pregnancy along with her nausea was her increasing forgetfulness. Well, she would just have to contact the landlord--he had a spare set. Perhaps she had left her keys behind at her parents'. She would have to ring them when she got home to find out. |
It was the noise that woke Garth, his brain registering it as alien and therefore potentially dangerous even through the agonizing pounding of the headache that felt like two cavemen bludgeoning one another with stone clubs inside his skull. He opened his eyes. It was the soft hiss of his indrawn breath that alerted Katriona to the fact that he was awake. Crouching on the floor beside the bed as she went through his pockets, she rifled through the wallet she had found, quickly pulling out the notes and stuffing them into her pocket at the same time as she got to her feet and turned to run towards the door. Garth was fast but Katriona was faster and she had the advantage of being fully dressed and alert. As she raced down the stairs heading for the front door and freedom. Garth cursed; he knew that it was impossible for him to pursue her completely nude. Who was she and, more importantly, how the devil had she got into the Hat? Grumpily, he picked up his discarded and now empty wallet. The area they were living in wasn't exactly up-market and he had noticed the gangs of youths loitering on the pavement; the girls in their suspiciously short, tight outfits who hung around the corner of the street watching the men driving slowly past them. It was just as well that he and Claudia were planning to move. London, in his opinion, was no place to bring up a baby. Babies, children, needed fresh air, space and freedom, the kind of country childhood that both he and Claudia had enjoyed. There was no point in his going back to bed now. He turned and studied the bedroom floor and his scattered clothing. The room, the whole flat, stank of whisky and stale air. As he went to open one of the windows, he was frowning. The girl who had gone through his wallet must have got into the flat somehow, but how? God, but his head ached, his memories of the previous evening blurred and irritattngly incomplete. He could remember getting home and having that first drink, but after that. Garth shook his head. There were odd shards of something there, a woman. her hair. her voice. His frown deepened as he fought to concentrate on them, but they were too vague. too elusive. more dream shadows than reality. How had that damn girl got in? He went to check the lock, but as he had already seen, it hadn't been forced. He would have to have a word with the landlord, check if any of the other tenants had had anything stolen from the other flats, but before he did that he ought to get their flat straightened before Claudia returned from her parents'. Claudia was thinking about Garth as she turned into the street, but as she drew level with the house and saw Garth's car parked outside, the unexpectedness of the sight caused her to stall her own car before parking it clumsily and racing upstairs to their flat. Knocking impatiently on the door, she called out, "Garth. Garth, are you in there?" A shower, several mugs of black coffee and some headache tablets had made Garth feel distinctly more his normal self even if they hadn't restored his memory of the previous evening and the night's lost hours. "Garth, I saw your car... you shouldn't be here ... are you all right are you...?" "I'm fine," Garth reassured her as he let her in, adding in concern, 'but you don't look too good. " "I was thinking about you all the way here," Claudia said as she followed him inside, shivering slightly. "I was worrying about you... but what are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Northern Ireland." "I know. It was cancelled." Something in the tone of his voice warned Claudia. She scanned his face anxiously before saying uncertainly, "Something is wrong. Are you what...?" "Nothing's wrong with me Garth assured her, then told her quickly what had happened, his voice and face grim. "Oh, Garth, no. Oh, no, that poor boy. His family, his parents..." "They had to cancel the tour, of course. There was no way of keeping it a secret. A thing like that affects the men's morale. There'd have been talk about the tour being jinxed, that kind of thing." Claudia looked shocked, her hand going to her mouth in distress. "I had to tell his parents." "Oh, Garth..." Instinctively, Claudia wrapped her arms around him, and as he held her close and breathed in the familiar sweet, fresh scent of her, Garth closed his eyes against the hard acid burn of the moisture stinging his eyes. "The CO told me to come home. I'd forgotten that you wouldn't be here." "Oh, Garth," Claudia reproached herself, 'and you were all on your own. What did you. " She broke off, giving him a rueful look as he gestured towards the empty whisky bottle he had just been about to throw out. "Stupid, I know," he agreed when he saw the look on her face. "But I can promise you I'm paying for it this morning. Today I've got the mother and father of all headaches. How about you, though?" Tm fine. It's just this awful sickness. " She made a face. "It's supposed to stop at twelve weeks and it's still with me now! Oh, Garth, I nearly forgot," she added. "Have you seen my keys anywhere? It was only when I was driving back I realised I hadn't got them. " "No. No, I haven't," Garth responded. "Could you have left them at your parents'?" "I might have done. I'll ring them later to check." "I think you should ring them now," Garth told her. "When I woke up this morning, there was someone here going though my wallet. The lock hasn't been forced and--' " Someone. someone broke into the flat," Claudia concluded. "Oh, Garth, I... But do you really think they could have used my keys?" "We won't know until we check with your parents," Garth gently pointed out to her, 'but it isn't exactly inconceivable, is it, given your work, that someone might have taken your keys? " "No. No, it isn't," Claudia agreed, shivering a little as she thought about the dismal, yawning canyons that were the corridors and stairwells in the tower blocks she visited with their fetid smells of urine and rubbish and their ever present gangs of youths. What would have happened if she had been the one to be woken up by some intruder going through their things? It didn't bear thinking about. As though he had guessed what was going through her mind. Garth hugged her tightly, say n ing gruffly, "The sooner the three of us find ourselves a proper home, the better." As Claudia smiled up at him. Garth's hold on her tightened. "It's two o'clock in the afternoon," Claudia protested as he bent his head to kiss her. "So?" Garth teased back, adding wickedly, "Isn't a woman in your delicate condition supposed to rest in the afternoon?" "That was in our mothers' day," Claudia responded indignantly, but Garth noticed that she made no attempt to move away from him and he noticed, too, how warm and soft her body felt, how familiar. How familiar. Somewhere, a warning bell went off but it rang so deep within his subconscious mind that all he could hear of it was a very faint echo that faded almost as soon as he tried to grasp it. "Garth, do you really think someone might have stolen my keys?" Claudia mumbled against his mouth. "Well, it's a distinct possibility, isn't it?" he returned. "I'll get a safety chain and bolt to fit on the door before I go back to barracks," he promised her as he bent to pick her up and carry her through into the bedroom. He had changed the bedding that reeked of the whisky he must have spilled on it and taken it down to their local launderette to wash. Guessing the question that Claudia was going to ask him as she saw the fresh bed linen he bent over and slowly started to kiss her. Now that she was carrying their child, their lovemaking was different--quieter, gentler, less intensely passionate perhaps, but to him somehow deeper and richer, as though their mutual awareness of the life they had created bonded them at a new, more mature, less carefree level. "I'm getting to be almost afraid to do this in case I hurt you," Garth whispered to her as he slowly started to penetrate her. /! know, but the doctor said it was all right," Claudia reassured him. Her own sex drive had diminished with her pregnancy, her breasts felt sore and tender, and her constant nausea left her feeling almost permanently tired. But as though in compensation, her desire to be close to Garth, to be held by him, to feel close to him both physically and emotionally, had increased. She loved the feeling of protection and safety it gave her to be held close to his body, to be wrapped in his arms, to know that he was there for both of them, her and their baby. "I was so afraid about your going away this time," she told him in a whisper while he moved carefully inside her. Tou won't still have to go, will you? " "I doubt it. Now that I know this tour has been cancelled, I intend to bring my leaving date forward to what it was originally supposed to be. Mmm.-you feel good. I'm not hurting you, am I?" Claudia shook her head, closing her eyes and letting her thoughts drift, accelerate, as her body quickened to the rhythm of Garth's. Their lovemaking was tender and leisurely, Garth's orgasm not as fiercely intense as she was accustomed to on their first time in bed after they had been apart. "How long have you got at home?" she asked him a little later as she lay beside him, her body curled towards his. "Only forty-eight hours," Garth replied. "Mmm..." Garth reached out and placed his hand over her belly. "You know, I sometimes can't quite believe it," he told her huskily. "No, sometimes I can't, either," Claudia agreed. "You... you aren't sorry, are you?" she questioned him. "You are pleased?" "Of course I'm pleased," Garth answered gruffly, reaching out for her and rocking her in his arms as he held her tight. "Of course I'm pleased." Kicking open the kitchen door, Estelle put down her supermarket carriers of food and went to switch on the answering machine. Blade was sulking with her. She gave a small shrug--so, let him sulk. She was familiar enough with his moods to know that ultimately he would get in touch with her. She was halfway back to the kitchen when she heard the familiar male voice on the tape. For a moment, she tensed and then very deliberately closed the door between herself and the answering machine, leaving her father's voice to speak into the silence of the empty room. Her father! Rather the man who had fathered her. Well, he could keep his pretence of wanting to get in touch with her, of wanting to see her. What use did she have for him now? Three months--that was the length of time he had stayed around for her after her birth, three months before he had had enough of being a father to her. He hadn't wanted her then and she certainly didn't want him now. It filled her with angry contempt to see the way people like Tara carried on about their parents, their precious mummies and daddies. Saw agely, she mimicked an upper-class accent under her breath as she mouthed the words. And what made her even more contemptuous was to see the way that Garth so obviously adored his daughter. In her opinion, parents were a necessary evil that one had to put up with until one could break free of them. Not that she had had too many problems in that direction. Her mother had a hedonistic, selfish approach to life, which meant that being a hands-on mother had never been a role that held any appeal for her. Estelle could remember how appalled Lorraine had been when Blade's school threatened to expel him. "But that means we shall have to have both of them here with us," she had protested to Ethian. They had been in their bedroom at the time and Estelle--six years old--had been listening outside the bedroom door. "He hasn't been expelled yet," Ethian had calmed her, 'and even if he is, well, I expect we'll be able to find another school to take him. " "I'd like to send Estelle away to school," Estelle heard her mother telling him. "But, of course, if I do, her father will no doubt insist on paying her fees direct and cutting my maintenance." "Does he know that you've moved her to a state school?" Estelle's new stepfather asked Lorraine. "No, of course not. He doesn't have the least idea just how expensive she is to keep. I can hardly bear to think of the money he must waste on that wretched house he's bought for Sophie, never mind the money he's undoubtedly settled on their son. Why on earth couldn't he have done something like that for Estelle?" "She's a girl," Ethian answered dispassionately. "She hardly warrants that kind of investment." So now she knew the reason her father had wanted nothing to do with her. He had gone away when she was a baby because she was only a girl. Thoughtfully, she had made her way back to her own bedroom. She was used to listening to her mother's complaints about her father's financial meanness towards them. Her mother liked wearing pretty clothes and going to all the best parties; she liked summers in Tuscany and winters in Barbados. And Estelle had learned while very young that her mother deeply resented whatever or whoever prevented her from doing what she enjoyed. There was nothing Lorraine enjoyed more than accompanying her husband to the large number of corporate 'dos' his work required him to attend. A pretty, vain, completely self-centred woman, she divided the rest of her time between shopping and visiting beauticians and hairdressers. Estelle knew perfectly well that if she were to dial the number of the apartment in the exclusive block that her mother had persuaded Ethian to buy the previous year, she would be unlikely to get a response from anything other than the an n swering machine and that even if she did leave her a message, her mother would probably not bother to ring back. "You're an adult now, a woman," she had told Estelle on the day of her eighteenth birthday. "And I really do think, darling, that it's time for you to look around for somewhere of your own to live." Estelle had known immediately what her mother had meant. They were both women and her mother had no intention of sharing anything she considered to be hers with another woman, not even her. "You'll have your father's allowance and I'll speak to Ethian. I'm sure he'll want to do something to help you," her mother had assured her. Estelle had been living in her cramped little flat for less than six months when Ethian had stopped paying the allowance he had promised to make her. She still had the money she received from her father, of course, but she wasn't able to live on that, and the pittance she earned working in an exclusive Bond Street shop didn't even pay for the clothes she bought there at cost. It had been one of the girls she worked with who had suggested that she might know of a way Estelle could improve her finances. It wouldn't be so different from what her mother did anyway. Yes, her mother might be married to Ethian, but it had never been any secret to Estelle that Lorraine used his sexual hunger for her to get from him what she wanted in terms of clothes, money, holidays. The only difference between them was that she, Estelle, didn't have to restrict herself to one man. "Has Estelle rung back yet?" Sophie Frensham asked her husband John. Estelle's father shook his head. "I'll leave it a couple of days and then try again." Correctly interpreting the look on his face, Sophie pushed aside the fruit she had been preparing to make jam with and, wiping her hands, walked across the kitchen and put her arms lovingly around him. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was huge and old-fashioned. When John had inherited the place from his father ten years ago, he had promised her that just as soon as he could afford it, she could start work on modern ising the whole place, but while John might be wealthy in terms of land and assets, he was unfortunately cash poor. Farming was no way for a sane man to try to make a living, he was fond of saying, but despite that, Sophie knew how proud he was of the fact that Ian, their son, was determined to follow in his father's footsteps. She had known John since childhood. Her grandfather had been Lord Lieutenant of the County, and while John's family were not tenants of her grandfather, John, like all the other local children, had been invited up to the hall for the biannual parties her grandparents gave for their tenants and neighbours. Although they were of a similar age, as teenagers they had gone their separate ways to follow their separate interests. She had worked abroad for a while, learning and then teaching French, while John, like many of his peers, had turned his back on tradition and the role in life expected of him, and instead of making his life here at the farm he would one day inherit, he had gone instead to London, which had then been a Mecca for young people. London in the seventies--she had heard about it, read about it, but still found it difficult to envisage John, the John she knew and loved, being a part of that reportedly wild and exuberant scene. Her parents had been a little concerned when she had first announced that she wanted to marry him. "He's a divorced man with a child," her mother had pointed out quietly, but Sophie had refused to be swayed, and her faith in him had been more than justified, more than repaid. At the end of the month, their daughter Rebecca would be celebrating her twenty-first birthday. Sophie's brother, who had inherited from their grandfather, had offered the ballroom at the hall for the event, and she knew how much it would mean to John to have his elder daughter Estelle there. Privately, she had her doubts about the kind of life Estelle was living--Sophie had a woman's instinct about her stepdaughter, which warned her that her beloved John could be very shocked and hurt by the way his daughter lived her life--but she loved him too much to want to voice such thoughts to him. She didn't want to disillusion him and she just hoped that Estelle herself wouldn't do so, either! "She's my daughter, my first child, yet she's a stranger to me," he gruffly told her now. "And that's my fault. I should have tried harder, done more. I was so damn glad to get out of that marriage that I never even gave a thought to ensuring that I had proper access to Estelle." "Things were different in those days," Sophie tried to comfort him. "Everyone believed then that a child was better off left with its mother, and you did try," she reminded him, remembering all the useless attempts they had made to persuade his ex-wife to allow Estelle to come to them during school holidays. She had never refused point-blank, but what she had done was quite simply make it impossible for them to have her other than for the odd short visit. And then there was the matter of the very generous allowance that John had paid his elder daughter right up until her twenty-first birthday, a far more generous allowance than either of his children from his second marriage had ever received. While Ian, their son, had been at agricultural college, he had had to work in his spare time to help finance his education, as had Rebecca. New agricultural policies, coupled with the crippling effects of things like BSE, the usually fatal cattle disease, had dramatically changed the way John farmed their land, and every bit of money they managed to accumulate had to be put back into the farm. But Sophie had reminded herself every time she felt herself starting to resent the financial strain that John's elder child made on their resources of just how very much more fortunate her children were in that they had the loving presence of their father in their lives on a day-today basis. John had admitted to her that he had never taken very much interest in Estelle as a baby. "The whole thing, Lorraine's pregnancy and Estelle's birth, was a total mistake, something that just wasn't meant to happen. Lorraine swore right through the first few months that she intended to have her pregnancy terminated. But I... I couldn't let her do that," he had confessed grimly. "We fought like cat and dog over it. We should never really have married. The whole thing was a disaster right from the start. God alone knows what I thought I was doing, and then, of course, when Lorraine realised that I was serious about our moving back down here to the farm, that was it. There was no way she was going to leave London. "In fact..." He stopped. What was the point in going over it all again? Sophie had, after all, heard the story of his destructive and thankfully brief marriage often enough. Silently, Sophie watched him. She could guess what he was thinking, how much he hoped that Estelle would get in touch with them and how much he wanted her to be there with them when they celebrated Rebecca's coming of age, to be a part of them. Sophie wasn't quite sure what had alerted her to the truth about Estelle--a certain sixth sense perhaps, an awareness, a horrible dark knowing that she had tried desperately to avoid until its darkness had been innocently confirmed by a friend who mentioned that she had bumped into Estelle in London and that she had been accompanying a man known to them both. The man in question was nearly thirty years Estelle's senior, very wealthy and very, very married. Sophie's friend had assumed that their being together was completely innocent and the result of his having been introduced to Estelle over the previous Christmas when Estelle had totally unexpectedly turned up on her father's doorstep, but Sophie had known otherwise. She could never tell John because she knew how guilty he already felt about her. "I should have sued for custody," he had said forcefully one summer when Estelle had been eleven. She had just spent a week with them, disdaining the activities and company of their own children, shutting herself away in her room for most of her visit and running up a huge phone bill. "She ought to have been running around outside with the others... and not..." He had paused, shaking his head. "She's not like a child. She's more of a miniature adult. I feel so guilty, Sophie," he had said often, 'so helpless. I ought to have done more, tried harder." Would it have made any difference if he had, if Estelle had been brought up surrounded by love and security as their own children had? If she had been subjected to the loving, caring discipline they had exercised with Ian and Rebecca, if she had known as they had known, that she was loved and wanted? As he saw the sympathetic look on her face, John knew that there was nothing that Sophie could say to change how he felt. His guilt went too deep. Watching Sophie measuring out the sugar to put with the fruit in preparation to boil up the jam, John silently thanked whatever beneficent presence in his life had arranged for Sophie to love him. She was totally different from his first wife, so totally different in every possible way. He had met Lorraine during the early seventies while he was living in London. Originally from a small working-class town in the north of England, she had been in London for just under two years when she and John had first met at a party thrown by a friend of a friend John had met at college. His family, especially his father, had been filled with disapproval when John had announced that instead of following family tradition by going to a local college, he intended instead to study at the London School of Economics. "That's not a university. It's a breeding ground for drop-outs and lefties," his father had growled furiously, but John hadn't been prepared to change his mind. At eighteen, nearly nineteen, what he thought of as the narrowness of his parents' lives, the constraint and dullness of the life he himself would be expected to live, had filled him with a fierce determination to escape, to live, and it had been in this reckless mood that he had met Lorraine. Eighteen months his senior, she had just broken up with her previous boyfriend, a forty- year-old recording studio executive who had, he later discovered, balked at her efforts to get him to the altar. Lorraine might have been part of the London 'scene' and everything that it encompassed, but she still was a hard-headed, shrewd northerner--sex before marriage was all very well just as long as it ultimately led to marriage. Lorraine had seen her grandmother, her mother and her aunts live gruellingly hard lives that had worn them out by the time they were in their forties. She could see her friends from school starting the same inevitable progression, getting themselves a lad, falling pregnant by him, getting married quickly and shamefacedly, renting a small terraced house if they were lucky enough to have a lad who could afford such luxury, or moving in with his or their own mam and dad if he couldn't, their lives virtually over before they had begun, at least in Lorraine's eyes. That wasn't going to happen to her. So very deliberately, she had packed her bags and taken herself off to London, getting herself a job in a shop to start with, in one of the multitude of new boutiques that were springing up all over the capital. It was an age of crumbling barriers, of a new interaction between the classes. Northern accents were something to be worn proudly, but even so, Lorraine quietly and secretly learned to smooth out the rawness of hers. She quickly came to realise, too, that her passport to the kind of money and comfortable life she wanted would have to be a man. And she had openly told John when their marriage was in its final throes that initially he had seemed the ideal candidate. Well-connected, and so she had mistakenly thought then, comfortably wealthy, and even more importantly, not as yet tarnished by the cynicism that had begun to dull the glow of London's gilded youth. Lorraine had quickly set about capital ising on his obvious infatuation with her, while he was still naive enough to believe she shared his feelings, still naive enough to adore and worship her. Less than three months after they had met, they were married. John's family had not been pleased and John could still remember Lorraine's reaction to them when he had taken her home so that he could show off his new bride. "Ugh... My God, how could anyone live here in all this mud?" she had demanded disparagingly when she had first seen the farm--and in his father's hearing. When his mother had offered to lend her a horse so that they could go out riding, she had shuddered in disgust and exclaimed, "Ride a horse? Certainly not. They smell." No, she had not endeared herself to his family, nor had she realised at that point that, apart from his grant, he was totally dependent on his father. "What do you mean your father's stopped your allowance?" she had demanded of him angrily after their return to London. "What does your father have to do with it? It's your money." "No, no, it isn't," he had denied quietly, going on to explain his true financial situation to her. He had money in trust, it was true, but he would not have access to it until he was thirty, and then because it was family money, it had already been tacitly agreed that most of it would go into the farm. "Go into the farm? No, no way at all!" Lorraine had declared furiously. Ten weeks later, after his parents had made it clear how they felt about his marriage, he and Lorraine were summoned home. "In view of the fact that you and your wife are expecting a child, I've decided to reinstate your allowance," his father told him curtly. "I'm still not at all happy about the situation and I still believe that you've behaved recklessly and without proper consideration. You've always known that. " He had stopped and shaken his head before adding tersely, " I'm not going to say any more. Lorraine is, after all, your wife and soon to be the mother of your child, even if I. " John could remember even now the sense of shock and disorientation he had felt while listen n ing to him. As soon as he could, he had escaped from his father's study and gone in search of his wife. She had been sitting upstairs in their bed room. Going over to her, he demanded, "Why didn't you tell me that you're pregnant?" "I was waiting to make sure," she told him coolly. "You didn't tell me, but you told my parents?" he continued angrily. "Your mother's offered me your old pram," Lorraine told him before bursting out angrily, "My God, you'd think that at the very least your parents would offer to equip the nursery. After all, it isn't as though they can't afford it. All they need to do is sell one of their damned fields." John had listened to her in disbelief. The scales had well and truly fallen from his eyes in the few short weeks of their marriage, and now with her blatantly selfish comment about the field, she had shown him, underlined for him, if it had needed underlining, just how vast the gulf between them actually was, vast and unbridgeable. That had been the moment when he knew that their marriage was over. It was a mistake he should never have made, and to his eternal shame, the last thing, the last person, he had thought about as he contemplated the trap he had so stupidly set for himself was the child that he and Lorraine had conceived. On the way back to London, Lorraine had questioned him ceaselessly about his trust fund, complaining that she had heard of umpteen people who had managed to obtain access to theirs. "I can't," he had protested, 'not without the agreement of the trustees. " "Then I can't have this baby," Lorraine had told him savagely. It had taken several minutes for the threat to sink in properly, but once it had, John knew that she meant exactly what she was saying. Her determination to get access to his trust fund money became a war she waged with merciless aggression over the following weeks, and the day she showed him the appointment card from the abortion clinic, he knew that she had won. John knew that he would never forget the shame and humiliation, the sense of having let the side down, the family down, he had experienced when he had gone to his father and told him, begged him, to approach the trustees on his behalf. He knew, too, that he would never forget the look of sadness in his father's eyes as he listened to what he had to say. At his father's insistence, half the money from his trust fund was used to buy a house. The other half went into their joint bank account, which Lorraine proceeded to empty while they were waiting for their divorce. What he could never forget was that there had been a moment, a heartbeat of time, when he had actually wished that Lorraine had simply gone ahead with the termination of her pregnancy. The baby she was carrying might be his child, but he had felt no sense of having fathered it, no pride or joy, no love, just an immense sense of doom of being burdened by something he didn't want and hadn't planned to have. Once during her childhood, when he had tried to talk to Estelle, she had turned to him and told him coolly, "It's too late to pretend that you care about me now. Mother has told me everything. I know you wanted her to have an abortion. I know that you didn't want me...." And he had felt too heartsick to tell her the truth, too afraid of what it might do to her, to tell her that her mother had been the one who had threatened him with the abortion. Neither had he ever been able to bring himself to tell her that Lorraine had, in his view at least, deliberately conceived so that she could use his child as a means of manipulating and controlling not just him but his parents, as well. He might have been the one who had paid financially for his mistake in marrying Lorraine, but he had never been able to totally rid himself of the suspicion that it had been Estelle, his daughter, his child, who had paid the greater price in emotional and psychological terms. Lorraine's second husband was shrewd with money, as mean and greedy as Lorraine was herself. More than once on the few brief occasions when they had been obliged to meet, John had had to listen to him boasting about the 'perks' that went with his high-powered job. He was, Sophie had suggested dryly, the kind of man who despite earning a six-figure annual salary nevertheless experienced an almost orgasmic-like thrill at the thought of using his firm's stationery to save on buying his own. "They're two of a kind," she had told John observantly after one particularly trying incident involving Estelle's school fees, before adding lovingly, 'and so are we. " At least Ethian had been able to provide Lorraine with the kind of lifestyle she had always craved, John acknowledged. Ethian's company regularly sponsored charity events, polo matches, balls, corporate days to the Goodwood races and the Chelsea Rower Show and many other activities on the social calendar. And if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, Lorraine invariably appeared at these occasions wearing glamorous clothes and revelling in playing the part of the executive wife. "She always looks so glamorous and elegant," Sophie had commented ruefully the previous Christmas when a friend had shown her a copy of a Country Life feature with photographs of a ball Lorraine had attended. "Maybe, but inwardly she's still undoubtedly the same cold-hearted, greedy, self-centred woman she's always been," John had responded before grasping Sophie's arms and telling her softly, "I thank God every day of my life that I've been lucky enough to find you, my Sophie. You are all the things that she isn't, that she never could be. All the things any man could ever want in a woman." He looked at the phone. He'd give it another couple of hours and then he'd try Estelle's number again. Nothing could ever alter the fact that he hadn't been the father he should have been to her when she had been young. It had taken the birth of his and Sophie's first child, Ian, to wipe out the bitterness and anger, the sense of entrapent and betrayal he had felt at Estelle's conception, and to show him what being a parent, a father, was really all about. He had tried to make it up to her, had tried and was still trying. She was his first-born child, this daughter of his, but she was Lorraine's child, as well, and deep in his heart of hearts, he knew that was something he could never forget, that it was a barrier between them that had never truly been breached. |
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