* * *
The days fell into a similar pattern. Despite his faint stirrings of jealousy Nicky was devoted to his father, and Briony normally got up early with Kieron so that the little boy could see him before he left for work. Since their arrival at the cottage, Kieron had become far more distant and there were no more of those barbed comments she had come to dread. Often it was late when he got home, and then he started spending odd nights in the flat in London. Briony told herself that she was glad. She could sleep far more easily when he wasn’t there, and yet that wasn’t true. She found it ridiculously difficult to sleep when he was away, and Nicky got fractious, demanding to know when his daddy was coming back.
One evening the phone rang and a man asked for Kieron, introducing himself as the owner of the cottage. He sounded most anxious to know how they had settled in, and on impulse when he had rung off, Briony dialled the number of the London flat, intending to tell Kieron about the call.
The phone rang for a long time, and she was just about to hang up when someone picked up the receiver, and a female voice called, ‘I’ve got it, darling, I expect it’s the paper. What a time to ring!’
Briony recognised the voice instantly as Gail’s and hung up quietly. She didn’t know why the knowledge that Gail was with her husband in his flat should cause her such bitter pain that she wanted to scream with the agony of it, but it did.
‘Mummy sad?’ Nicky asked sorrowfully.
Kieron returned home the following night, and although Briony had told herself that she would simply behave as though the phone call had never happened, she found it impossible even to speak to him.
He flung his jacket over a chair, wrenching off his tie and dropping into a chintz-covered chair, with a weary, ‘God, I’m tired!’
‘Perhaps you should try sleeping more often,’ Briony said sweetly.
His eyes had been closed, and suddenly they flew open, nearly black with anger and exhaustion.
‘And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he asked bitingly. ‘A red-blooded man has certain needs and tensions and if they aren’t satisfied he sometimes finds it damned hard to sleep—but of course you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’ he taunted.
They had supper in stony silence, Briony getting up the moment the meal was over to stack the dishes in the dishwasher and tidy up the kitchen. When she went back to the living room Kieron was fast asleep, his features oddly vulnerable and more like Nick
y’s than ever. Telling herself that it was merely that resemblance that tugged so insidiously at her heart, she hardened it against him and went upstairs. Let him sleep down there if he liked! She wasn’t going to wake him.
She heard the phone ringing through a fog of sleep, dimly, without actually waking up, and in the morning there was a note propped up against a milk bottle telling her that Kieron had been called out by the paper.
‘Thanks for the TLC,’ he had scribbled sarcastically on the bottom of it, and she crumpled it up angrily, and flung it in a wastepaper basket.
What was the point of Kieron insisting on marrying her so that he could be a father to Nicky, when even at weekends he went to work, she thought savagely, refusing to acknowledge that it wasn’t merely the little boy who suffered during his father’s absence.
As much to work off her bad temper as anything else she dressed in old jeans and a tee-shirt, spending most of the morning weeding one of the large flower beds, while Nicky toddled about close by chattering happily to himself. He was an imaginative child, and listening to his mysterious monologue Briony felt a renewal of all her love for him.
By lunchtime her back and legs were aching from bending over, and after tidying up the weeds she took Nicky in for a rest, while she showered.
The sound of a car in the lane brought her rushing to the window, her hair still damp as she pulled on a thin silk robe, but it was Matt who was walking up the garden path, not Kieron.
She ran downstairs to let him in, too suprised by his unexpected arrival to question what he was doing there. If anything he looked more dejected than ever.
‘It’s Mary,’ he told her unhappily when Briony had made him a cup of tea. ‘She’s threatening to leave me again. She complains that I’m boring and that I never take her anywhere. But how can I? Kieron works us like galley slaves. Our circulation has shot up these last few weeks, but he says he won’t rest until he’s made the Globe the best selling paper in the country. I’m so tired out when I get home that all I want to do is fall asleep, but Mary just can’t seem to understand.’
He looked almost ready to burst into tears, and Briony had to suppress a wave of irritation. No wonder Mary was able to bully him so easily—his apathetic lack of self-confidence was enough to drive a saint mad.
‘Look, you must explain to her how busy you are,’ Briony told him. ‘Either that or find yourself a job that will be less taxing.’
‘You think like she does, don’t you?’ he accused bitterly. ‘You’ve changed, Briony. You used to understand, but now you’re just like all the others. Perhaps I ought to act more like Kieron,’ he said wildly, grabbing hold of her before she could stop him. ‘Perhaps I ought to just take what I want.’
‘Matt, let me go at once!’ Briony demanded, more cross than frightened. ‘Don’t be silly. I haven’t changed at all. I just think that now you and Mary are back together you ought to try and make the best of it.’
She sensed that the anger had gone out of him, but instead of releasing her, he bowed his head on her shoulder, his voice thick with tears. ‘Oh God, Briony, I’m sorry.’
‘You will be, if you don’t get out of here right now,’ Kieron said icily from the door. As Matt stepped awkwardly back Kieron’s eyes moved slowly over Briony’s thinly clad body, missing nothing, his face rigid with an anger that made her stomach churn in protesting fear.
Matt stumbled towards the door after one look at Kieron’s set face, his eyes sliding uncomfortably away from Briony’s as she willed him to explain what had happened.
‘And if you so much as set one foot here again, I’ll personally tear you limb from limb!’ Kieron warned him harshly opening the door.
When Matt had gone, the silence in the kitchen seemed to stretch like taut wire, and only when they heard his car engine fire did Kieron look contemptuously at the empty tea-cups and drawl sardonically: