Calum held up one of the new packages: the elegant black that she’d ordered, the packaging she’d been hiding from him.
‘You’ve managed to keep this a secret from me. How do you think this makes me look, Savannah? I’m your husband and I didn’t know about this. How fucking dare you go behind my back?’
She was frozen for a moment and then she began to stammer: ‘It was just an idea I had.’ She wouldn’t throw Anthony under the bus. ‘We can junk it, but—’
‘But everyone think’s it’s amazing. I saw them all there and they are so proud of you. Our Savannah has done it again.’
She began to cry now. The rage in his voice did something to her.
‘Don’t give me the tears,’ he hissed, contempt in every word. ‘Jesus, you definitely shouldn’t drink. And I don’t know what you’re getting so over emotional about. There’s always some big whiney drama with you, isn’t there? You just listen to me: I’m explaining the facts to you. I make the decisions. You know fucking nothing. You think you’d have got where you are now without me?’
Savannah looked down, his eyes were glittering dangerously now.
The terror was upon her.
The fear.
She felt trapped. As if every word was a step in a field of land mines.
‘You’re just useless, you can’t do anything.’
He leaned over her, trying to dwarf her, coldness emanating from every part of him. ‘You are nothing without me.Nothing,’ he hissed. ‘You just spend money and ruin our kid, because she is ruined. Why the fuck is that? Because you’re making her into a little fairy princess and you’re too fucking stupid to see how that’s a mistake. I didn’t get where I am today by being mollycoddled. I got there by hard graft. You understand? Hard graft.’
There were beads of sweat on his forehead now.
His eyes looked crazed. He was like a rat, she thought: a rat that had turned on her, had grown in size and was going to kill her one way or the other.
‘How do you think it makes me feel when my wife goes behind my back?’
‘I didn’t,’ she whimpered.
‘I’ll show you how it makes me feel,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bed, coming?’
Sex, he wanted sex. Rough sex. It was the ultimate weapon. His ultimate weapon.
Savannah’s brain processed it rapidly. Sex might make everything better.
‘Of course, darling,’ she said, ignoring the fact that she was shaking with fear.
She had the barriers totally up now. She was insulated – the real Savannah hidden inside the shell of the physical person.
The act of insulation was like bringing down shutters and when she did it, she was safe because she blanked out the real Savannah, put on the mask. The masked, shuttered Savannah could smile and get through this, so she did.
Insulated Savannah pulled back those unshed tears, her face almost frozen, palely expressionless.
She followed her husband upstairs to bed but took a detour to stick her head in the door to see how Clary was. Her daughter was curled up in a little ball. She always slept curled towards the corner of her bed, like a shell around the comforting mound of her teddy bears. Calum said she was too old for teddy bears, but then he would. Savannah never let him win when it came to this. There were a couple of things she would fight over.
‘No. She’s a little girl; little girls need teddy bears and stuff like that.’
Fighting for what Clary needed were the only times she disobeyed him. It was so much easier to go with Calum, agree with everything he said, because life was easier. But for Clary, she had to be strong and sometimes disagree with him.
She planted a gentle kiss on her daughter’s forehead knowing that Clary wouldn’t wake. Then she went into the grand master suite, an area Calum had decorated to his own taste. It wasn’t the pretty bower that Savannah would have liked. It was very much a man’s room, all dark wooden wardrobes, dark wooden floor, grey walls, charcoal bed covers.
He was at the dressing table taking off his cufflinks. She went into the bathroom hoping she might remove her make-up, but steeling herself because this was an endurance test, had been for a very long time. She put a soaked cotton pad on one eye and had removed the mascara and make-up from it and was just about to start on the second one, when he appeared behind her.
‘Stop that,’ he said, ‘come to bed.’
It was his different voice, his sex voice.
