Phantom Marriage Read online

  They came downstairs together dressed in identical dungarees.

  ‘Simon couldn’t fasten his sneakers,’ Mandy told her, ‘so I had to do it for him.’

  Suppressing a sigh, Tara inspected their newly washed hands. It was quite normal for Mandy to be more advanced than her brother at this stage, she knew, but she was concerned that Mandy’s possessively maternal attitude to her brother, although delightful, might prevent Simon from learning to stand on his own two feet.

  Both children ate hungrily. Tara was an excellent cook and mainly through firm insistence in their early years, neither twin was faddy about food. Her budget might not stretch to luxury items, Tara reflected, but at least the twins had a well balanced and healthy diet; and as far as she was concerned they were far better off without too many sweets and chocolates.

  Mandy promised to have her own slender build, but already Simon was heavier, and she suspected he would grow up to resemble his father.

  After dinner she always set aside an hour to play with the twins and read to them. Mandy with quicksilver impatience grew bored with reading, but Simon was always anxious for more. Almost identical in looks, by nature they were vastly different, Tara reflected.

  Her mother had started a campaign obviously intended to steer her towards marriage; its benefits to the twins always stressed whenever she went home, but so far Tara had resisted. For, one thing, marriage would mean telling someone about the twins’ paternity, which she had no desire to do; for another it meant exposing herself once more to their rejection.

  Other girls, she knew, suffered the same experience she had done without the same results, but then she had always been acutely sensitive; too sensitive, she acknowledged, recognising that some of her fear for Simon sprang from the fact that she feared he had inherited this vulnerability from her.

  It seemed almost incredible now that her body had ever experienced the aching pleasure which was now only a dim memory, but which had once driven her to forget all her principles and scruples to the extent that nothing mattered save for James’s possession of her, even though she had known quite well that at the time his actions were blurred and his mind dazed by a lethal combination of exhaustion and jet lag.

  Not a pretty memory, and one which had served to help her keep a cool control over her emotions ever since. He loved her, James had said, but his later actions had not borne out those words. What he had felt for her had simply been a momentary desire, and she, fathoms deep in love with him, had encouraged and incited him into making love to her. The twins were the result of that careless lovemaking, and on them Tara had poured out all the love she had been forced to bottle up inside her.

  Casual affairs were just not her thing, and while there had been plenty of men who had made it plain that they desired her, Tara had always held them at a distance. So far Chas had been the most determined, but Tara had held her ground, and it gave her no pleasure to know that Chas’s sudden spurts of temper against the models were fuelled by sexual frustration caused by her refusal to sleep with him.

  So far she had managed to walk the dangerously fine line of keeping their personal relationship completely separate from work. As a photographer Chas was a professional down to his fingertips, but Tara worried that one day he would break what was obviously a self-imposed rule, and remind her that he had it in his power to make her unemployed. So far he had not used that weapon, and she honoured him for it. However, there was this weekend job coming up involving taking some fashion shots at Leeds Castle. She had racked her brains for a legitimate excuse for not going, but so far none had been forthcoming. The twins could go with them, Chas had said easily when she commented that she could not simply abandon them for an entire weekend.

  It came to her that Susan’s invitation would provide a cast-iron excuse for refusing to go; it would also prevent Chas from guessing her fear that if she simply refused the assignment he would press his suit even harder, forcing the confrontation she had so far managed to avoid.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE morning didn’t get off to a good start. For one thing, Tara’s alarm failed to go off on time, and she was eventually woken up by Mandy tugging impatiently at the bedclothes.

  Tara normally got up an hour before the twins, using the time to wash her hair and do her make-up. Although far from vain she considered presenting the right image an important part of her job, although sometimes it was hard to strike the narrow dividing line between appearing too glamorous or too staid. Normally she settled for simply keeping her hair clean and glossy, using the minimum amount of make-up and dressing in clothes that didn’t impede her work and yet still looked smart.

  This morning there was no time to wash her hair, and she plaited it quickly while she supervised the twins’ breakfasts.

  Simon for some reason had decided that he loathed boiled egg and was morosely engaged in pushing his sulkily round his plate.

  ‘Simon, eat up!’ Exasperation sharpened her voice and she sighed when the little boy’s face crumpled.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ A swift hug and a kiss banished the threatening tears, although Simon was obviously not going to let her off easily.

  ‘My tummy hurts,’ he complained. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to school. Why can’t I stay at home with you?’

  ‘Because I have to go out to work,’ Tara told him firmly, surreptitiously checking his pulse and temperature. Both seemed normal. Simon’s pain was more imaginary than real, she suspected, and sympathised with him, remembering how often she had suffered similar afflictions.

  ‘Are we going to stay with that lady for the weekend?’ Mandy demanded as Tara bustled them outside to the Mini. ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tara was forced to admit. ‘In the country somewhere.’

  ‘The country?’ Simon perked up immediately. ‘On a farm?’ he breathed hopefully.

  Although it was ridiculously early to be worrying about careers for the twins, Simon’s very evident love of the countryside and its inhabitants led Tara to believe that he would be happiest in some sort of outdoor life connected with farming.

  ‘Not a farm, I don’t think,’ Tara told him.

  ‘But we can go, can’t we?’ Mandy pleaded. ‘We never go anywhere. Everyone else in our class is always going away.’

  Allowing for childish exaggeration, Tara knew the criticism was well founded. The twins’ school fees meant that there was very little money left over for luxuries such as holidays, although they did spend weekends with her mother and aunt and uncle occasionally. These visits were not always a great success; her mother had never been able to fully conceal her disapproval of the twins’ birth, and all the time they were in her company Tara was on tenterhooks in case her mother made some unguarded reference to James.

  As disapproving as she had been of Tara herself, it was for James that she had reserved a bitter, intense hatred which had not waned with the years.

  And yet in many ways she was more to blame than James, Tara reflected tiredly. By the time she had realised the true nature of her feelings for him it had been too late for her to turn back. Susan’s mother was rarely at home; she had a partnership in a business in New York and spent much of her time there, and Tara with adolescent logic, fathoms deep in love, had somehow managed to dismiss her almost entirely from her mind, not attempting to hide her love for James.

  With the added wisdom the intervening years had brought Tara could see things more objectively from James’ point of view; married to a woman several years his elder, a woman who spent most of her time away from home leaving him alone, a taxing, struggle business to run—was it so very surprising that he had given in to the impulse to take the solace she had so innocently offered?

  Perhaps not, but surely he must have known so much better than she had that there was no future for them? Surely he should have had the sophistication and worldly wisdom to call a halt before matters finally got out of hand? That was what she could not forgive him—that he had carelessly disregarded the consequences of allowing a mixture of boredom and sexual desire to overcome the barriers which should have existed between them.

  She had been seventeen to his twenty-six—not a vast difference in terms of years, but in terms of experience…

  ‘Mummy, we’re here!’ Mandy announced shrilly, drawing her attention to the fact that she had been about to drive past the school.

  After leaving the twins Tara drove straight to the studio. The moment she walked in she sensed that Chas was in one of his difficult moods. He grunted without looking up from the camera he was engrossed in. A model Tara recognised from previous sessions was sitting tensely on a bentwood chair, the atmosphere in the hot studio thick with tension.

  Summing up the situation at a glance, Tara shrugged out of her coat and filled the kettle in the small kitchen attached to the studio. Without saying a word she placed a mug of coffee in front of Chas and went across to chat to the model. She was nineteen, with several successful ad campaigns behind her, and Tara knew from the schedules that she had come in to sit for some practice shots for a Vogue feature.

  ‘Is he always like this?’ she asked Tara in an agonised whisper. ‘I remember last time I came here…’

  ‘It’s just his way,’ Tara soothed her. ‘He’s an artist with the camera and a perfectionist.’

  The other girl grimaced. ‘It’s at times like these that I wish I’d done as my parents wanted me to and gone on to university!’

  Chas’s brusque, ‘If you two have quite finished on the girl talk, perhaps we can get some work done,’ put an end to their conversation.

  It was lunchtime before Tara even had time to draw breath. Chas was in the kind of mood where he seemed almost driven, and it was both mentally and physically exhausting trying to keep pace with him.

  At two o’clock Chas finally announced irritably that he supposed they ought to break for lunch, and Tara went thankfully to buy them some sandwiches before he changed his mind. It wasn’t unusual for him to insist on working right through the day without stopping, and the hungry grumbling of her stomach had been distracting her attention for almost an hour.

  When she got back to the studio the model had gone and the phone was ringing. The ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the darkroom door meant exactly what it said, as she knew from experience, and reaching for the phone she dumped her sandwiches on the table.

  The crisp, cool tones of the twins’ headmistress sent tremors of fear jangling along her nerves.

  ‘The twins—’ she began urgently, but Mrs Ledbetter was obviously used to dealing with anxious parents, because she said soothingly, ‘Nothing to worry about, Mrs Bellamy, it’s just that Simon has been complaining of stomach ache all morning. Our Matron has checked him over and we can’t find anything wrong. He probably just wants a bit of coddling.’

  A thin flush of colour ran up under Tara’s fine skin as she tried to dissect the calming words to discover if they held an implied rebuke. One of her greatest burdens in bringing up the twins alone was that she couldn’t be at home with them. She had never tried to contact James after that first time when Susan’s mother had laughed in her face at her naïveté, and there was no one to support the twins apart from herself, so work was a basic necessity. But that didn’t stop the guilt, she thought shakily as she hung up, having assured Mrs Ledbetter that she was leaving immediately for the school.

  Did every working mother experience this knife-sharp anguish every time her child cried for her and she couldn’t be there? Guilt was a burden women seemed fashioned by nature to bear.

  Not daring to risk disturbing Chas, she wrote a brief note displaying it prominently on his desk, then hurried outside to her Mini.

  Simon was waiting for her in the school’s sick bay, looking pale and lethargic. Mandy was with him, and she leaped off her chair and rushed towards Tara, crying importantly, ‘Simon’s been sick, and he was crying, but I’ve been looking after him’

  Tara praised her warmly; for all her ebullience and apparent resilience Mandy was still vulnerable, as all children were vulnerable when they lacked the love of one parent.

  ‘I don’t think there’s really anything much Wrong,’ Mrs Staines, the Matron assured her with a kind smile. ‘A couple of days in bed and some spoiling will probably work wonders.’

  A couple of days in bed! Tara groaned, fighting back her dismay. That meant taking two more precious days from her holiday allowance. Chas would be furious. Normally during school holidays she managed to come to an arrangement with a neighbour who lived close to her and who was willing to look after the twins for her, but she was away visiting her parents, and anyway Tara doubted that Simon in his present mood would accept anyone apart from herself.

  ‘Some country air, that will bring the roses back to his cheeks,’ Matron pronounced.

  ‘Can we go to the country, Mummy?’ Simon pleaded on the way home. He had perked up when he saw her, but he was still listless, and Tara’s heart smote her. Poor little scrap; his sickness was no less real for being caused by emotional rather than physical malaise.

  ‘All right,’ she gave in, ‘but remember, Susan might have changed her mind.’

  ‘She said we could,’ Mandy pointed out with irrefutable logic, ‘and people should always do things when they say they will.’

  Tara suppressed another sigh. Right now she did not feel up to explaining to her daughter the ethics governing adult behaviour, and it sank still further when she reached home to discover Chas’s car parked outside.

  He saw her drive up and came striding across to the Mini.

  ‘So, how’s the wounded soldier?’ he asked Simon affably but with narrowed eyes and a certain grimness that alerted Tara’s defence mechanisms.

  His cool, ‘You fuss too much,’ as she unlocked the front door and bustled the twins into the kitchen, reinforced her feelings. ‘He looks as right as rain to me.’

  ‘Matron said I was to have two days at home,’ Simon told Chas informatively. ‘Mummy is going to stay with me, and then we’re going to spend the weekend in the country.’

  ‘Are you now? Is that true, “Mummy"?’ Chas demanded bitterly. ‘Funny, but I had the distinct impression that you and I had a date for this weekend.’

  ‘I never promised I would come, Chas,’ Tara reminded him. ‘As it happens, we’ve been invited away for the weekend,’ she crossed her fingers childishly behind her back, ‘and in view of Simon’s sickness I feel it would do them both good to get away from London.’

  ‘Really?’ Anger kindled in his eyes. ‘Now isn’t that just a dandy get-out? Well, let me lay it on the line for you, Tara. I want you and you damn well know it. I’m not prepared to play games either.’

  Tara felt sick. Here came the crunch; the inevitable catastrophe she had been trying to avoid for weeks.

  ‘Meaning?’ she forced herself to say.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Chas replied in a low voice.

  ‘And if I don’t agree?’

  His answer was simply to glower at her before flinging the door open and striding angrily through it.

  She had known it had to come, and Chas’s attitude had only reinforced all her own doubts about the feasibility of her continuing to work for him, but she could not deny that giving up her job at this particular minute in time was something she simply could not afford to do.

  ‘Why are you looking like that, Mummy?’ Simon demanded suddenly. ‘Does your tummy feel funny too?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she agreed wryly. ‘Now come on, you’d better go and lie down if you aren’t feeling well.’

  It was early evening when she finally decided to ring Susan to accept her invitation for the weekend. They had nothing to lose by going, Tara decided, and besides, she felt totally unable to cope with the twins’ disappointment were she to refuse.

  Susan sounded ecstatic when she thanked her for the invitation and accepted it.

  ‘You’ll have to give me directions on how to find the place, though,’ Tara warned her. ‘Where did you say it was?’

  ‘In the Cotswolds,’ Susan told her airily. ‘But don’t worry about getting there. I’ll send someone to pick you up if you just tell me what time would be convenient, and give me your address.’

  On the point of refusing, Tara remembered the luxurious BMW she had seen outside the school, and contemplated the luxury of being driven in such a vehicle. Susan had mentioned her chauffeur and doubtless this task would be given to him.

  They chatted for several minutes, and when Tara mentioned her job Susan was obviously impressed. ‘Chas Saunders?’ she exclaimed in tones of awe. ‘You lucky thing! He’s incredibly sexy, isn’t he? I’ve never met him myself, but I’ve heard about him.’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’ Tara agreed drily. Chas and his female companion of the moment were popular gossip column fodder.

  ‘You’re not involved there yourself, are you?’ Susan asked, obviously picking up the undertone in her voice.

  Tara’s wry, ‘Chas is strictly a one-night-stand man,’ was an evasive answer, but it seemed to satisfy her friend, who laughed and said teasingly, ‘Yeah, but what a night!’ before announcing that she had to go as she could hear Piers crying.

  * * *

  With the mercurial resilience of children the world over, Simon declared in the morning that he felt well enough to return to school and Tara was able to go back to the studio.

  She drove there with mounting dread. Chas was alone in the huge room when she opened the door. He looked up, scowled, and then ignored her as she removed her jacket and hung it on the coat-stand. They were supposed to be doing some outdoor shots, so she had dressed comfortably in jeans, and a checked shirt worn underneath a thick, sleveless sheepskin waistcoat.

  When she had removed her coat she turned round to find Chas assessing her slim jean-clad body thoughtfully. Despite her resolve colour rose in her cheeks. She turned away, intending to put the kettle on, but Chas’s ‘Tara,’ halted her in her tracks.

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