No. She had no regrets. Had Joel?
* * *
As Joel turned away from watching Philippa he saw that Sally was watching him, a faint shadow smudging her eyes.
He reached out to touch her, but before he could say anything Neil Saunders came up to him.
‘Have you got a minute, Joel?’ he asked him.
Excusing himself to Sally, Joel turned to listen to what he wanted to say.
‘I wouldn’t mind specialising in paediatric nursing … once I’ve qualified,’ Cathy commented to Sally enthusiastically. Her decision to train as a nurse had surprised and pleased Sally, and she had encouraged and helped her as much as she could.
She was working part-time again now, a decision she and Joel had made together when he had discovered how uncomfortable she felt with the transposition of their traditional roles.
It hadn’t been easy, talking about how she felt … for either of them.
There had been times when she had wondered if they or their marriage could survive such painful honesty, but Joel had refused to give up or to let her do so and in his determination she had recognised the same strength which had originally drawn her to him.
It had been Joel too who had suggested that they go for counselling and that it might be easier for them to be open and honest about the sexual problems within their marriage in front of someone else. ‘It isn’t a matter of blaming or accusing,’ he had told her when she had cried and said that she knew he thought it was all her fault. ‘I still love you, Sal, and you still love me … but we both know that that isn’t enough.’
And he had been right; it had been easier to say how she felt through an intermediary. It had made the whole issue somehow less emotive.
‘When we’ve had a row or a disagreement about something … when you’ve ignored me all evening, I can’t suddenly switch off from that when we go to bed and become sexually turned on,’ she had told Joel.
‘I need to feel that you want me … not just for sex … that you’re prepared to take the trouble to … to arouse me before we go to bed,’ she had told him uncomfortably when the counsellor had invited her to explain her feelings …
‘How can I do that when whenever I come near you you push me away?’ Joel had countered. ‘You complain if I touch you in front of the kids, and the bedroom’s the only place where we have any privacy … where we’re on our own …’
Both of them had almost been equally surprised when she had told the counsellor how ambivalent she had felt about Joel’s vasectomy, how although on one level she had known he had made the right decision, on another she had felt almost cheated.
Joel had been openly distressed by her admission. He too would have liked another child, other children, he had admitted, and he had felt guilty at not being in a position to support a larger family. The spectre of his own childhood poverty had haunted him, though, along with his embarrassment over their hand-to-mouth existence and his father’s lack of status.
It was only now that he was actually coming to terms with those feelings and becoming able to value his father’s good points, rather than to focus on the others which as a child had caused him so much embarrassment.
Listening to him falteringly and uncomfortably revealing how he had felt about his childhood had moved Sally unbearably, rekindling all the tenderness and emotion she had felt for him when they first met.
It had been his offer to undergo a reversal of his vasectomy operation if that was what she wanted that had touched her the most, though.
‘No. You were right,’ she had told him softly. ‘We couldn’t have afforded another baby, and now I’m content with the children we have.’
It had taken some months of counselling before she felt able to respond properly to Joel in bed, and it had been a little while after that before, totally unexpectedly and out of the blue one morning, when he was making love to her, she had realised that she was going to climax.
That had been a memorable milestone, but nowhere near as memorable as the afternoon she had paused in her housework, frowning over the unfamiliar feeling flickering through her body, not even recognising it properly for what it was until she heard Joel’s voice in the kitchen and felt her stomach twist in reactive anticipation.
She hadn’t said anything, almost more alarmed than pleased by what she was experiencing.
She had told Joel she wanted an early night and had then spent over an hour in the bathroom, showering, smoothing scented body lotion on to her skin, looking at herself uncertainly in the mirror, wondering if he still found the sight of her naked body arousing. She never normally initiated any lovemaking between them, and her humiliation by Kenneth had left a small, painful scar which had never quite healed.
She went to bed and lay there tensely waiting for Joel, listening to the quiet hum of the television downstairs.
An hour later, still lying there waiting, she gave in to the anger and, pulling on her dressing-gown, went downstairs.
‘Sally, what is it—what’s wrong?’ Joel had asked her anxiously when he saw her.
What was wrong? Did he honestly not know?
Furiously she had opened her mouth to tell him and then the humour of the situation had struck her and instead she had started to laugh.