Ruby couldn’t bear any more.
‘I married you for the sake of our sons,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And this child I am carrying now is yours. Yes, I took the pill, but if you remember I wasn’t well whilst we were in London. I believe that is how I came to conceive. In some circumstances a…a stomach upset and nausea can damage the pill’s efficiency.’
‘A very convenient excuse,’ Sander sneered. ‘Do you really expect me to believe it, knowing you as I do? You didn’t marry me for the twins’ sake, Ruby. You married me for my money.’
‘That’s not true,’ Ruby denied. How could he think so badly of her? Anger joined her pain. Sander had called himself a fool, but she was the fool. For loving him, and for believing that she could reach out to him with that love.
‘I know you,’ he repeated, and hearing those words Ruby felt her self-control break.
‘No, you don’t know me, Sander. All you know is your own blind prejudice. When this baby is born I shall have its DNA tested, and I can promise you now that he or she will be proved to be your child and a true sibling to the twins. However, by then it will be too late for you to know it and love it as your son or daughter, Sander, because there is no way I intend to allow my children to grow up with a father who feels and speaks as you do. You love the twins, I can see that, but as they grow to be men your attitude to me, their mother, your suspicions of me, are bound to contaminate their attitude to my sex. I will not have my sons growing up like you—unable to recognise love, unable to value it, unable to even see it.
‘Do you know what my worst sin has been? The thing I regret the most? It’s loving you, Sander. Because in loving you, I am not being a good mother to my children. You’ve constantly thrown at me my behaviour the first time we met, accusing me of being some wanton who came on to you. The truth is that I was a seventeen-year-old virgin—oh, yes you may look at me like that but it’s true—a naive and recklessly silly girl who, in the aftermath of losing her parents, ached so much for love to replace what she had lost that she convinced herself a man she saw across a crowded bar was her saviour, a hero, someone special who would lift her up out of the misery of her pain and loss and hold her safe in his arms. That was the true nature of my crime, Sander—idolising you and turning you into something you could never be.
‘And as for all those other men you like to accuse me of being with—they never existed. Not a single one of them. Do you really think I would be stupid enough to trust another man after the way you treated me? Yes, I expect I deserved it for behaving so stupidly. You wanted to teach me a lesson, I expect. I’m only surprised, knowing you as I now do, that you seem unable to accept that your lesson was successful.
‘There was only one reason I asked you for marriage, Sander—because I thought it would make you back off. But then, when I realised you genuinely wanted the twins, it was as I told you at the time—because I believe very strongly that children thrive best emotionally within the security of a family unit that contains two parents who intend to stay together. I grew up in that kind of family unit, and naturally it was what I wanted for my sons.
‘What you’ve just accused me of changes everything. I don’t want you poisoning the boys’ minds with your own horrible mindset. This baby will be their true sibling, but somehow I doubt that even DNA evidence will convince you of that. Quite simply it isn’t what you want to believe. You want to believe the worst of me. Perhaps you even need to believe it. In which case I feel very sorry for you. My job as a mother is to protect all my children. The twins are two very intelligent boys. They will quickly see that you do not accept their sister or brother and they might even mimic your behaviour. I will not allow that to happen.’
Initially he had been resolutely determined to deny that there could be any truth in Ruby’s angry outburst. But beneath the complex defence system his own hurt emotions had built up to protect him from the pain caused by his mother, tendrils of something ‘other’ had begun to unfurl. So small at first that he thought he could brush them away. But when he tried Sander discovered that they were rooted in a bedrock of inner need it stunned him to discover. When had this yearning to throw off the defensive chains that imprisoned him taken root? How could this part of him actually be willing to take Ruby’s side against himself? Struggling against the opposing forces within himself, Sander fought desperately for a way forward.
This was so much worse than anything she had imagined might happen, Ruby acknowledged. She had feared that Sander would be angry, but it had never occurred to her that he would refuse to accept that the child she had conceived was his. She should hate him for that. She wished that she could. Hatred would be cleansing and almost satisfying.
She would have to leave the island, of course. But she wasn’t going anywhere without the twins. They would miss Sander dreadfully, but she couldn’t risk them starting to think and feel as he did. She couldn’t let his bitterness infect them.
She turned to look through the still open patio doors, her vision blurred by the tears she was determined not to let him see.
‘There’s no point in us continuing this discussion,’ she told him. ‘Since it’s obvious that you prefer to think the worst of me.’
Without waiting to see if he was going to make any response Ruby headed for the patio, anxious to put as much distance between them as she could before her emotions overwhelmed her and the tears burning the backs of her eyes fell.
From the bedroom Sander watched her, his thoughts still at war with themselves. Ruby had reached the top of the flight of marble steps that led down to the lower part of the garden.
Blinking fiercely to hold back her tears, Ruby stepped forward, somehow mistiming her step, so that the heel of her shoe caught on the top step, pitching her forward.
Sander saw her stumble and then fall, tumbling down the marble steps. He raced after her, taking the steps two at a time to reach her crumpled body where it lay still at the bottom of the first flight of steps.
She was conscious—just. And her two words to him as he kneeled over her were a
gonized. ‘My baby…’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘SHE’S coming round now. Ruby, can you hear us?’
Her clouded vision slowly cleared and the vague outlines of white-clad figures formed into two nurses and a doctor, all three of them smiling reassuringly at her. Hospital. She was in hospital? Automatically she began to panic.
‘It’s all right, Ruby. You had a nasty fall, but you’re all right now. We’ve had to keep you sedated for a few days, to give your body time to rest, and we’ve performed some tests, so you’re bound to feel woozy and confused. Just relax.’
Relax! Ruby put her hand on top of the flat white sheet pulled tightly over her body. She was attached to some kind of drip, she realised.
‘My baby?’ she demanded anxiously.
The nurse closest to her looked at the doctor.
She’d lost her baby. Her fall—she remembered it now—had killed her baby. The pain was all-encompassing. She had let her baby down. She hadn’t protected it properly, either from her fall or from its father’s rejection. She felt too numb with grief to cry.
The nurse patted her hand. The doctor smiled at her.