‘My pleasure. We all need to kick back, sometimes. I do, anyway. That was irresponsible – but overdue.’
Her look was sympathetic. ‘I suppose Valerie’s drinking must be a strain. For the whole family.’
Usually, he blanked remarks like that, but Diane’s husband had nearly lost his life as a direct result of Valerie mixing liquor with a helicopter. And he realised that he wanted to talk about it. It might be a relief to open up. Not to have to be the strong one. He sighed. ‘Harold doesn’t seem aware. The girls don’t know the extent of it. Or, at least, I don’t think so, although Natalia and Alice occasionally make remarks about boozing. Valerie drinks. It’s part of her life. Shedrinks. Not just sometimes, not just socially – she drinks steadily. We have furious rows about her driving anyone else, especially the girls. She insists that she rarely drinks before six and rarely drives after. She’s only rated to fly in daylight, too, so it’s quite simple so far as she’s concerned: only drink in the evening ... on good days. On good days, most evenings she drinks a bottle or two of wine. I rage about her still being over the limit in the morning but she dismisses it as “fussing”.
‘But sometimes she has bad days. On a bad day she manages a bottle of vodka, mixing it into orange juice or coffee, any time of day.
‘I freak out and she treats me as a huge joke, won’t discuss the problem because she hasn’tgota problem, she says. Apparently, I’m a spoilsport. I take a few drinks much too seriously. I should lighten up.’
‘But it certainly sounds like she’s got a problem,’ Diane observed. She hesitated. ‘Does she have … you know – have help?’
He drew in a breath so deep that it dug a pain in his chest as her question chewed his conscience. ‘Wouldn’t hear of it. I suppose I ought to be going to one of these groups that support the family of a drinker. But then —’ He blinked out of the window at the black shadows in the hedgerow. ‘It would be an immense waste of time. She’s headstrong and drinking has made that worse. I read that the decision to stop drinking has to come from the drinker and I let that excuse me from taking any initiative. The truth is that you can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped, especially if they sneer at you for trying.
‘And sometime I wonder if I’m the cause. Everything. Maybe it’s me? Have I driven her to drink? But, if so, why didn’t she leave?’And why haven’t I?
In the confines of the car he could smell Diane’s personal scent, warm and clean. He breathed it in. Soothing. Everything about her soothed him.
‘So, to turn your earlier question back on yourself – you must’ve loved her, to marry her?’
He turned in his seat. ‘I probably did love her but I was nowhere near wanting to marry. She was my girlfriend and I was happy with that. But suddenly she confessed that she was pregnant, with all the tears and fears and the interminable brave conversations about abortion that went with a surprise baby. I hated the idea of abortion. I knew that if we got married, she’d keep the baby. Natalia. It was the right thing to do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, simply.
‘What was done was done and soon and we were OK when the girls were babies. We were too focused on them to get on each other’s nerves. But Natalia and Alice have grown up and moved out.’ His shoulders tensed. ‘And Tamzin and Valerie have a strange relationship. Close, but unhealthily tolerant. Blind to each other’s problems, each effectively endorses the other’s self-destructive behaviour.’
It felt quite natural to sit in the fast-growing dark confessing his problems to this unusual woman who seemed always to be so composed and pragmatic. He found himself wondering what his life would have been like if he’d shared it with a woman who didn’t fall into banshee mode whenever … well, whenever she damned well felt like it. Imagine living in a home that was peaceful, with a woman who was restful instead of rocking the house with screams and bellows.
In the twilight, he could make out the curve of Diane’s cheek and the straightness of her nose, the shift in the pattern on the fabric of her top as it folded around the contours of her breasts. And he was becoming aware of a need. The kind of need that a man might feel when tucked away with a woman he’d noticed from the instant he glanced across a waiting area and saw her staring at a policeman, a polite smile of astonished disbelief on her lips. If ‘noticing’ meant a clunk in his chest and eyes that refused to look away.
The need began to grow. He felt his breathing quicken.
‘We’ve got more of a habit than a marriage,’ he said, deliberately, trying to push her into a reaction. ‘We share a bed but it’s a big bed with a lot of space available. I’ve forgotten what meeting in the middle of all that space feels like. It’s been a long time since we … met in the middle.’ He waited, looking for signals.
But, no. No empathetic tuts or feminine clucks, no sympathetic hand on his arm. ‘Difficult,’ she agreed, neutrally, instead.
Irritation reared like a tormented bear inside him. He was spilling his guts about the situations he had to juggle every day and she called it ‘difficult’! ‘I’ll tell you what’s “difficult”,’ he snapped, goaded. ‘Being alone with a woman like you and having to behave!’ He froze as he realised that his thoughts had made it, uncensored, to his voice.
She shifted, minutely.
The silence magnified his words. They rang around inside his head. This, surely, would earn him a blast of indignation and fury. He braced himself for an icy, ‘I think you’d better take me back to my car!’
But Diane seemed more curious than explosive. ‘Why don’t you want to behave?’ She even sounded as if she might be smiling in the dark at his effrontery.
Having been honest to the point of lunacy, he felt obliged to crash on. ‘Because my problems usually absorb all my energy but I’ve realised that I’m more interested in you than in my problems and I can’t remember the last time I felt like that. I want to step off the world – my world – and into bed with you.’
She didn’t react at all.
The silence drew out. She was utterly still, staring into the evening.
He sighed. He’d better apologise. Reassure her that he really was reasonably safe and that these uncharacteristic sentences would soon stop popping out. He’d got used to missing sex because he was the kind of man who expected to feel guilt about cheating on his wife. Fidelity was just another habit.
But instead of uttering an apology, his mouth seemed to want him to lean across and brush his lips gently across her temple. When she stiffened but didn’t draw away, he let his mouth drift lower, feeling first the tingling brush of her eyebrow on his lips and then the soft flutteriness of her eyelashes. Her smooth cheekbone, her jaw. His mind churned with what the hell he wasdoingdriving a woman off to dark lanes and propositioning her. It must be the stress. An urge for release.
Oh yeahhhhh … He almost groaned aloud at the idea of finding release with her.
She was still.
And then he was kissing her mouth, his tongue stroking the supple softness of hers until, slowly, she responded, making his heart bump around with the pleasure of her proximity, her warmth. His hand wandered onto her upper arm, the back of his thumb brushing the side of her breast. And his palm moved in to investigate. He felt her jump. Tense.I’vepassed her boundaries ...he expected her to yank away with aghast demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He held his breath. But his hand continued to cup the delicious heaviness of her breast with a kind of helpless magnetism.
