The Marrying Game (60 page)

‘What? Oh, God –’

He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Relax. I’ll make you that cup of tea.’

‘I don’t believe it. I’ve been asleep for three hours.’ She smiled up into his face. ‘I’m glad you’re still here. Otherwise I might have thought I’d dreamt you. I have dreams about you all the time. If you’re going to the kitchen could you bring me a glass of water? I have to take some tablets.’ She struggled up on her elbows, looking round for her bag. ‘It’s incredible; I feel so much better.’

‘You look dreadful,’ Edward said. ‘And of course I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Adrian gave me away, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, thank God,’ Edward said. ‘He turns out to be a very decent sort.’

‘He was incredibly kind to me. Even though he thinks being ill is very bad manners.’

‘I’m not surprised you’ve been ill. There’s not a crumb of food here, and it’s freezing. Is there any way of turning the heating up?’

‘I’m afraid this is as good as it gets.’

‘Well, stay under that duvet.’

Edward made them fresh cups of tea with the last two tea bags, suppressing another lecture about thinking ahead when buying food. All this lunacy was only an
outward
sign of her state of mind. Nobody had put a label on it yet, but what Rufa had been through amounted to a kind of breakdown. And a good part of it had been his fault, though he had believed he was being utterly unselfish at the time.

Rufa was sitting up when he brought her the tea and the glass of water. She had removed her gloves, and made an attempt to smooth her hair. ‘Thanks so much. How is everyone? Is Linnet all right? I hated missing her birthday.’

‘Everyone’s fine,’ Edward said, sitting down. ‘They’ll be even more so when you tell them you’re coming home.’

‘Am I coming home?’ Rufa was bewildered, trying to remember why she could not go with him.

‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘When I’ve finished my tea, I’m taking you right out of this bloody igloo.’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes. More than anything.’

Edward took one of her cold hands. ‘Ru, darling, it’s all over. Let me look after you.’

She bowed her head. ‘I can’t. Not after what I did.’

‘My darling, that’s all forgotten.’

‘Not by me,’ Rufa said. Tears dropped from her eyes, on to the back of his hand.

‘Forgiveness doesn’t even come into it,’ he said softly, in the tender and caressing voice very few people heard. ‘I haven’t spent all this time searching for you because I wanted you to apologize. I should be saying sorry to you. I wasn’t honest with you about Prudence.’ He hated talking about Prudence, because he felt it made him look so pathetic. He did not want Rufa to see him as some
cringing
beggar pleading for sexual favours. It was as uncomfortable, in its way, as giving evidence to the War Crimes Tribunal; but it had to be done. ‘I didn’t tell you the whole history. I assumed it didn’t matter because it was all in the past. I’d forgotten what a stirrer she can be.’

‘You told her about us,’ Rufa said, her voice pinched with the hurt of it.

‘I didn’t have anyone else to talk to, so I talked to her,’ Edward said. He sighed. ‘I knew it was wrong at the time. I’m sorry.’

She looked up at him. ‘Do you swear it’s really over?’

‘God, yes. It was over after we split up that first time.’

‘After Alice died.’

‘Yes. When we— well, afterwards, it was never the same. Love didn’t really come into it. We saw each other maybe three times a year. She’s never achieved a happy marriage – I think because she kept trying to marry her father, but never mind that. She relied on me for safety, and friendship.’

‘And you relied on her for sex.’

‘Yes.’ Edward was annoyed with himself for being annoyed by this – he couldn’t exactly deny it. ‘I won’t say it meant nothing, but it was basically a friendly arrangement.’

‘Prudence seemed to think it was a lot more than that,’ Rufa said.

‘She wouldn’t give in before she’d put us both through hell. I can see that now. At the time, I thought the guilt would kill me.’ He smiled grimly. ‘You know how I hate being in the wrong.’

‘That day you took her out to lunch,’ Rufa said, ‘she
thought
she was going to get you into bed again, didn’t she?’

Edward was severely embarrassed. He saw now that he had handled the entire business of Prudence with spectacular ineptitude. He forced himself to look Rufa in the eye. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

‘You slept with her when you went to Paris.’ Rufa said.

‘Yes. Even though I’d just got engaged to you.’ He willed himself not to hide behind excuses. There were none. ‘I won’t say I couldn’t help it, because that would be ridiculous. But she offered, and I didn’t try to turn her down.’

She whispered, ‘You wanted sex.’

Edward groaned softly. ‘Of course I did. I was desperate for sex.’ He clasped his hands together, to keep himself from frightening her with the force of truth unbound. ‘My life, over the past few years, has been one long struggle to avoid anything that made me remember how desperate I was. My arrangement with Pru kept me from going mad.’

Breathlessly, Rufa asked, ‘Did I make you desperate?’

‘Oh, God.’ He tried to laugh, but he could easily have wept. ‘If you only knew.’

‘I wish you’d shown me.’

‘I was waiting for everything to be perfect. And that was impossible, with that bloody bargain standing between us.’

‘We should have talked more,’ Rufa said. ‘But we never talked about sex. If I tried to drop a hint, you went outside and mended the tractor.’

This was so true that Edward did laugh, though he despaired over the gulf there had been between them. ‘I
was
terrified of forcing you into anything. The idea of – of having you, when I’d paid for you – your mother decided I must be impotent.’

‘I thought you’d roll straight back into bed with Prudence, because she was good at sex and I wasn’t.’

‘Oh, God.’

She smiled faintly. ‘Stop saying that.’

‘Sorry. I’ll tell you everything I should have said at the time.’ Edward made himself look at her. ‘You were absolutely right, she made a pass at me at that lunch. I daresay it was extremely thick of me, but I was surprised.’

Rufa asked, ‘How did she do it?’

‘Must we go into detail?’

‘Yes.’

He gave her a painful smile. ‘All right. Pru said I’d made a fool of myself, by marrying you when you obviously had some kind of—’ He sighed. ‘Look, I’ll leave out the stuff she said about you. What’s the point? You got your own back.’

‘Did I?’

‘Come on, Rufa. She was furious when you took up with Triss. She says you’ve given him a nervous breakdown and jeopardized his finals, and I don’t know what.’

Rufa’s lips were pale in her pale face. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’

‘He’ll survive,’ Edward said drily. ‘A lot of this is about family history. I knew she was angry about the money. Pru’s not just greedy – there are all kinds of reasons why it matters to her to keep it in the family. As far as she was concerned, I might as well have set fire to it.’ This was not enough. He made himself expand. ‘After Alice died, I think I could have fallen in love with
her
quite easily. I know she considered marrying me – mainly because of her strange belief that I’m kind and easy to live with.’

‘You are kind,’ Rufa said. ‘You’d be easier to live with if you talked more, and admitted you were wrong sometimes.’

‘Thank you. As the psalm says, I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.’ Edward smiled, oddly touched by the solemn way she pointed out his faults. ‘Anyway, it didn’t work out. Pru wasn’t in love with me. I knew that when she fell in love properly, with someone else.’

‘Who?’

He could not look at her. ‘Doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t know him.’

‘It was the Man, wasn’t it?’

He sighed again. She wanted the whole truth. ‘Yes, of course it was. One of his greater passions. She fell in love with him, and, of course, he dumped her. I think he was the only man in the world who ever did. So when I married his beautiful daughter, Pru took it as rather an insult. But you might be glad to hear that I turned her down last time without too much difficulty. I expect she thinks I’m impotent too. She certainly thinks I’m an idiot. Perhaps I am.’ He reached out to stroke Rufa’s cheek with the tip of his finger. ‘I can’t give you up. I’m so madly in love with you that I’ll do anything to keep you. When Nancy rang me yesterday evening to tell me you were alone and ill, and patently nutty as a fruitcake, I had to come and bring you home. You’re not to decide anything, or think about anything, until you get there. And you’re not to worry that I’m going to expect you to do anything, just because you foolishly agreed to marry
me
.’ He smiled, longing to comfort her. ‘Those are your orders.’

Rufa’s tired eyes brimmed with tears. ‘It wasn’t foolish. It was the most sensible thing I ever did. I don’t know how to begin to say sorry.’

He sat down on the sofa beside her, gathering her into his arms. She clung to him, in a tempest of sobbing. He realized suddenly that something in the way she touched him had changed. The sense of physical reserve between them had vanished. The chip of ice the Man’s death had left in her heart was thawing. Now she pressed her face into his shoulder, as if she needed to touch him to ease some inner pain.

This whole train of thought was inconveniently arousing. Edward shifted against the cushions, so that Rufa would not notice he had an erection. He stroked the back of her head. ‘Stop it, Ru. I refuse to drive all the way to Melismate with you beating yourself up. I can see how sorry you are. You’ve nearly died of being sorry.’

‘I’m not ill – it’s only since I lost the baby –’ Rufa raised her head. ‘Did you tell Tristan?’

‘No.’ Edward could not help bringing this out curtly.

‘He ought to know.’

‘Hmm. I suppose so.’

Hesitantly, Rufa asked, ‘Have you heard from him? Do you know how he is?’

‘The last I heard, he was absolutely fine.’

‘I’m glad.’

They were silent. Edward asked, ‘Is that all you’re going to say?’

‘I couldn’t bear it if I’d made him miserable,’ Rufa said. ‘I wish I knew what got into me.’

‘You fell in love with him.’

‘I thought I was in love with him – with an idea of him, anyway. That’s all finished now.’ She spoke calmly, but he noticed how her fingers nervously gripped the lapel of his tweed coat. ‘I’d like to say it was another Rufa who fell in love with Tristan. But that would only sound like Linnet saying it was Postman Pat who scribbled on the walls. God knows what was going through my mind. I thought it would kill me to be apart from him. He wanted me such a lot.’

Edward winced over ‘he wanted me’, with its implication that her husband had not. He spoke as neutrally as he could. ‘I went to Oxford a few days after you did. I spoke to Tristan.’

‘How was he?’

‘Rather a mess. Said he’d do anything to get you back.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want to go back to him?’

‘No.’ Rufa’s body tensed in his arms. ‘I can’t go back to the way I felt about him. It was all based on – I don’t know – fantasies. I almost wanted to
be
him. And it all completely fell apart when I turned up on his doorstep.’

‘I heard,’ Edward said. ‘He told you to have an abortion. That and the disgusting state of his kitchen tore the scales from your eyes.’

Rufa gave a brief laugh that was half a sob. ‘Am I that predictable?’

‘I know you rather well.’ Edward’s inconvenient erection had subsided. He gave Rufa a friendly kiss on the forehead and released her. ‘I know you need to be at home. So please, let’s agree to forget about the past. We both made mistakes. I’ll forgive you, if you forgive me.’

‘There’s nothing to—’

‘Well, good. Pack up your things, and I’ll let Rose know you’re on your way.’

‘Now?’

‘Absolutely now,’ Edward said briskly. ‘You can accuse me of being a control freak if you like, but you’re not fit to be alone.’

Edward made Rufa stay in the flat while he went out in the wind and the snow to fetch his car. By the time he had driven from the New Town, the car was blissfully warm. Rufa lay back in the passenger seat with a sigh of pleasure that made them both laugh.

‘I haven’t been this warm for weeks.’

He steered into a long line of cars heading towards the motorway. ‘Go back to sleep if you like.’

She swallowed a yawn. ‘I keep telling you, I’m not an invalid. I feel so much better now I’ve got these tablets. I’ll take a share of the driving later.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. Stop trying to be helpful. Do you mind if I put the news on?’

‘Go ahead.’

Edward switched on the radio in time for the weather. Heavy snow was predicted on the eastern side of Scotland. There had been a pile-up on the motorway, which was causing long delays.

Rufa murmured, ‘That’s our road, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘We could always go back to the flat, and leave it till tomorrow.’

‘I am not going back to that flat,’ Edward snapped. ‘I’d rather spend the whole night in a traffic jam.’ She was anxious. He made himself smile at her reassuringly.
‘But
it won’t come to that. I’m sure I can find a short cut.’