Heart-breaking.
These were all words that had been uttered at Orla’s funeral, none of which had rung true for Alastair. Her death had been a merciful release. For them both.
As his mood darkened, and a small nondescript cruiser passed by on his left, he wondered what the middle-aged couple on board would think if they knew they had just smiled into the face of a man who was responsible for his wife’s death.
Chapter Fifty-One
Sorrel woke from a deep sleep and a dream in which she was begging Alastair to realise that she was the only woman worthy of his love. She was telling him that he’d pretended for too long it wasn’t true, but it was time now to stop denying themselves their right to be together.
Lying on Jenna’s bed, Sorrel recoiled from the raw humiliating pain of the dream. Her body as rigid as a board, she could not recall a time when she felt more full of hatred. It was a hatred directed at herself. She had learnt to live with jealousy, one of the most destructive of emotions, but its close companion, self-loathing, had now joined forces and was cruelly taunting her for her pathetic blindness.
How could she have lived this long the way she had? And for what? The hope that somehow Alastair might admit that he had made a mistake and married the wrong woman?
Had she really believed he would do that? And what if he had? What had she really hoped for?
Definitely not this. Not him running straight off into the arms of a stranger once he was free of Orla. Not the pain of having his newfound happiness shoved in her face by bringing the new love of his life here so he could show her off.
Could he have been any more heartless? But then she supposed anyone caught up in the initial rapture of what they think is love enters a state of near madness, of seeing the world as they want to see it. Nothing that has gone before is of any importance; it’s all about the moment. Certainly that was how she was when she fell in love with Alastair.
It was how she had felt again when Alastair turned to her in his hour of need, when life with Orla proved too much for him. Later, when he’d had his fill of Sorrel, he had excused himself, blamed what he’d done on a temporary loss of control.
‘Loss of control?’ she’d repeated. ‘We’ve been sleeping together for the last four weeks, how is that a temporary loss of control?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Oh, she knew full well what he meant. She’d served her purpose and now it was to be business as usual.
That was twenty-five years ago, when Orla was facing the reality that if she didn’t conceive soon, it was game over for her when it came to motherhood. After yet another miscarriage, Alastair had been at his wits’ end trying to console her – a fool’s errand if ever there was one; Orla was not the consoling kind.
But Alastair was in need of consolation and Sorrel had played her part beautifully, offering him a ready shoulder on which to cry. Not that it was her shoulder he was interested in; his needs were far more basic than that. He had wanted her body, and sex that wasn’t done to order. He wanted honest-to-God, uncomplicated sex without the burden of expectation hanging over him. And Sorrel willingly provided the means for that to happen.
At the time, she wasn’t working and while the children were at school she could easily slip down to London on the train to meet him. With Orla up at Linston End throwing her inconsolable anger and frustration into her art, Sorrel met Alastair at their house in Fulham. Lying in bed she relished knowing that she was the one he had turned to, the one whom he could rely upon to make him happy. She had almost hoped that she would end up pregnant by him, if only to flaunt her fertility in Orla’s face, but Alastair was meticulously careful in that respect.
Following their lovemaking she would take the train home feeling on top of the world one minute, then wracked with guilt the next. What sort of a woman was she that could do this to her husband, and with his best friend? But then she would recall Simon siding with Orla over poor Rachel gaining more weight than was good for her, and her vengeful heart would harden.
When Alastair decided that ‘things’ had gone on for long enough, that what they were doing wasn’t fair to Orla and Simon, Sorrel felt her heart being cracked in two all over again. How had she allowed this to happen? Did she really think so little of herself that she had given herself to Alastair only to be cast aside when his conscience got the better of him?
Ashamed of her weakness, she had readily promised Alastair that she would keep the affair secret. She didn’t want anyone to know that she had been used. But as time went by, she saw that her promise to Alastair gave her an irrevocable tie to him. It gave her power too, a power that she knew she could wield as and when she chose.
Alastair had always assumed she had too much at stake to risk telling Orla of their affair, that the consequences would bring her world tumbling down around her. He had made the assumption that her loyalty to Simon and their children was his trump card over her, and for many years it had been; but now she was consumed with the need to disabuse him of that arrogant certainty and to hell with the consequences.
It was the way he had looked and spoken to her in the kitchen during lunch that had been the final straw. But then he had asked them all to leave to ensure their rooms were fit to be viewed by the couple waiting in the hall. And in what now seemed like an act of astonishing compliance on her part, she had obeyed. That’s how it had always been for her, she supposed.
But now she wanted everyone to know what a shallow two-faced bastard he was, how he had used her, and how he was the worst friend anyone could have. If that meant she went down with his sinking ship, so be it. It was no more than they both deserved.
That was what self-loathing did for a person, it made every ounce of guilt you had suppressed rise to the surface. In Sorrel’s case it had opened her eyes to the truth of what she had allowed herself to become, and it needed to end.
Chapter Fifty-Two
For the first time since arriving at Linston End, Valentina was beginning to have her doubts. Something she rarely did.
From her vantage point of sitting alone in the pavilion, and nursing a headache that had come on while tidying up the kitchen after lunch, she had seen Alastair going off on his own in one of his boats. She had very nearly called out to him to take her with him, but the very fact that he had not sought her company made her think twice. For Alastair to do that – for him not even to come looking for her on his return from the station – implied he wanted to be alone. And then Simon had appeared, and she had swept aside any nagging concerns and focused her energy on showing Simon that she was not some silly woman he could push around. She knew his type of old, full of hot air and with no sense of how absurd he was.
But the moment he had left her, she had felt herself deflate, and wondered why she hadn’t taunted him about his wife’s performance at lunch. It really wasn’t like Valentina to let an opportunity slip past her. Was she losing her touch? Or was it simply that she had been momentarily wrong-footed by Alastair’s behaviour?
She texted Irina to ask if anything had been said in the car when Alastair had driven them to the station. Seconds later her stepdaughter replied.
It was very awkward, Alastair hardly spoke to us.
