shly begun to believe that at her age she was past suffering the pangs of need and loneliness which had beset her in her twenties, or perhaps she had simply grown careless. She had no idea which of these weaknesses had been responsible for her reaction to Silas.
* * *
WHEN SHE GOT home, the Jaguar was no longer parked outside. She stared at the space where it had been, her heart thumping. Had Silas perhaps changed his mind and left, without telling her? What if he had gone? Wouldn’t that be for the best?
All the time she was walking up the path and unlocking the back door, she was telling herself that it would be a relief if he had gone—that it was the most sensible thing he could do, that she wouldn’t be in the least bit upset…and yet when she opened the kitchen door and saw the note he had left on the table, she reached for it with trembling hands, scanning it quickly while her mouth went dry and her stomach heaved.
‘Gone to Chester to see if I can borrow some research material from their library,’ the note read.
She pulled out a chair and sat down in it. She felt weak and oddly light-headed, and she told herself that what she was experiencing could not be relief. Of course it couldn’t be, and yet all the time she was unpacking and putting away her shopping, she was listening for the sound of his car, for his footsteps, for his voice.
When she had finished and he still hadn’t returned, she paced restlessly around the kitchen, unable to settle to anything.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she muttered out loud to herself impatiently. ‘You’re a woman of thirty-six and you’re behaving like a girl of sixteen. Anyone would think you’d fallen in love with the man.’
She froze where she stood, suddenly shivering.
What a ridiculous notion. Of course she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She was far too old for that sort of thing. Far, far too sensible. Women of her age did not fall in love. After all, she barely knew Silas.
And yet already she had told him far more about herself than she had told some of her closest friends.
That knowledge was like touching the nerve in an aching tooth: highly painful and highly addictive, something to which her thoughts kept returning again and again no matter how much she tried to distract him.
‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’ she derided herself. ‘You’re virtually willing yourself to be in love with him. Stupid woman.’
She went into the study determined to banish such thoughts with some physical work, but when she had opened the door and walked inside the room she stood and blinked in amazement.
Every surface was clean and polished, the window sparkled, and the carpet was immaculate. All those items she had put to one side to be disposed of were neatly stacked in one corner of the room, a fire had been laid in the grate and the old brass coal bucket had been polished within an inch of its life.
All that the room now lacked was its curtains, and on the desk stood a modern computer screen and keyboard, neither of them somehow or other looking at all out of place with the heavy old-fashioned furniture.
Silas certainly hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said he was perfectly capable of wielding a vacuum cleaner and a duster, and yet for some reason, instead of feeling relieved that she no longer had to face the task of cleaning out the room, she felt faintly aggrieved. Resentful almost, as though in cleaning the room himself he had somehow in a subtle and non-verbal way been telling her that he had no need of her help, that he was entirely self-reliant, that there was no place for her in his life.
But she didn’t want a place in his life. She didn’t want to become involved in any way at all with a man who, while he might give her some brief passing sexual pleasure, could never satisfy her deeper and more important emotional needs, could never give her the companionship, the emotional stability, the love she had always denied to herself that she wanted, but which in actual fact…
Stop this right there, she warned herself shakily. Such thoughts could only lead in one direction. Such thoughts could only lead her into pain and the kind of heart-searching which would achieve nothing.
She was content with her life as it was. Well, she was reasonably content…as content as a woman of her age had any right to expect to be. When she looked around, how many of her friends, of the women she knew, were truly and happily fulfilled by their marriages in the way they had anticipated when they entered into them? Not many of them, and, while sometimes she envied them their husbands, more often than not she found herself listening to their complaints, their frustrations, and thinking that perhaps after all she was more fortunate than they.
The kind of relationship she had once dreamed so yearningly of was pure fiction, did not exist…could not exist. No single other human being could ever match one’s own emotional needs exactly and immediately, and only a fool thought that it was possible for them to do so.
But she did have friends who were happy, who were content, who cheerfully admitted that, while their marriages had matured into far different relationships from those they had initially envisaged, these relationships were good ones; their husbands were men whom they actually liked as well as loved, despite their differences and their disappointments.
She turned blindly towards the window. Was she really content to spend the rest of her life alone? Katie had her own life to live and she had no wish to chain her daughter to her even if that were possible.
So what alternatives were left to her? A steady, secure relationship with one of the men she already knew; there were two or three among her acquaintances who had made it clear that they would like more from her than mere friendship, and who were free and willing to commit themselves to her.
She moved restlessly around the room. The trouble was that, much as she liked each of these men, she did not desire them…did not want the kind of intimacy with them that came with marriage.
So what else was there? An affair… A series of affairs… No, that had never appealed to her. Although she listened with curiosity and sometimes disbelief to her more sophisticated friends’ descriptions of their own relationships, the more she heard, the more she herself felt repressed by her lack of knowledge, her own awareness that while she might in terms of years be a woman of maturity, in terms of experience she was as ignorant as the teenager she had been at sixteen.
No amount of listening to other people’s experiences could make up for the lack of one’s own. Any man who wanted to take her to bed would quite naturally assume that she had the knowledge and the skill to take full responsibility for her own pleasure and a good measure of his. Men, especially older men, her friends told her, were often selfish lovers, expecting, as one of her more frank friends had cheerfully told her, ‘That you’re going to do all the really hard work and they’re going to enjoy the results of it. Give me a younger man every time! They might not have the experience but they more than make up for that with their enthusiasm.’
Hazel did not know why but she did not feel inclined to become involved with a younger man. Perhaps she simply did not have the self-confidence.
No. What she wanted…
What she wanted was Silas.