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'I can see why you needed a nanny,' was all he said. 'Commodity trading is an exhausting job. I don't suppose you got to
see your son as much as you would have liked.'
The gentle sympathy in his voice caught her unawares and she found herself floundering between resentment at his
observations and an overpowering urge to pour out her feelings. She had become so accustomed to carrying the weight of single
motherhood on her shoulders, to pushing on however tired or depressed or just plain fed up she might be, that confiding in other
people was a talent she had lost a long time ago. Even her girlfriends had not been privy to her innermost thoughts. She'd met them
whenever they could arrange to, which was infrequently because most of them worked in the same high-octane field as she had, and
they chatted about bonuses, holidays, frustrations at work but seldom about how they really felt. They were all young, in enviably
well-paid jobs, they had no time to be depressed. They laughed, ate at expensive restaurants and veered away from anything that might
imply that their lifestyles were not all that they were cracked up to be.
'I suppose you think that I was an irresponsible mother, bringing a child into the world and then not even spending any
quality time with him, but I had no choice. Trading was the only thing I was good at. I didn't go to university, I was a hopeless
secretary. I would have been fired sooner or later if my boss didn't happen to notice that I had an ability to predict market trends. And
trading is a game you can't slow down without getting left behind.' She could hear the pitch of her voice rising in defensiveness and
took a few deep, steadying breaths. 'Are we nearly there?'
'Nearly.'
She waited for him to continue trying to drag information out of her and was half hoping that he would because in the
darkness of the car it felt good to talk, like being in a confessional, but he didn't. He just pointed out one or two landmarks to her and
then prosaically began to talk about places she could visit, things Simon might like to see when they got a chance.
Why wasn't he talking about her? she wondered feverishly. For a minute there she had actually thought that he was
genuinely interested, genuinely sympathetic to what she had gone through for the past five years, and there was a dam inside her
waiting to burst. But suddenly he had stopped asking questions, lost all interest.
As soon as he had heard what she had done for a living, Sara thought slowly. She had been so right to bracket James
Dalgleish and Phillip in the same category. Neither of them had really liked a woman who possessed an intellect that could threaten
them. Phillip had slept with her because she had been a novelty for him and because he had liked the way she looked, but where was
he now? Getting married and moving to Sydney. Getting married to a woman who was blonde, helpless and had never done a day's
hard work in her life. Getting married to a woman who was seven months pregnant. She herself had not seen her ex for nearly nine
months and her friends had been all too willing to explain why. She suspected even he might have felt some twinge of feeling for her
and the son he had never really acknowledged. In due course, a letter would arrive and there would be one line of regret for the way
things turned out but rather more than one somehow laying the blame for everything at her door, and a good deal more devoted to how
he had finally found what he had been looking for all his life. The letter would arrive to a flat occupied by tenants and she sincerely
hoped that they would drop it in the nearest bin. She detested Phillip, but rejection still hurt and what hurt even more was knowing that
her son had been rejected as well.
By the time they reached the village hall, her mood had sunk to rock-bottom. She could barely look at the man walking in
with her, and when he brushed against her arm as they entered she visibly flinched.
Thankfully there was no need to stay glued to his side. Fiona had turned up and was waving at her from across the room,
and the sea of hostility and suspicion she thought she would find was absent. Everyone was too busy having a good time. The music
was loud and operated by an enthusiastic youth with shoulder-length hair and there was a long buffet table extending across one side
of the hall, on which she assumed food would be laid out in due course.
It was as far removed from a fashionable London nightclub as it was possible to get.
'I'll get you a drink,' James said into her ear. 'Stay here.' He moved away into the crowd, stopping every two feet to have a
few words with someone, and Sara immediately headed towards Fiona.
Stay here? Did he imagine that he could issue imperatives and she would mindlessly obey? Out of the corner of her eye,
she could see him still trying to get to the bar, where three middle-aged gentlemen were trying to keep up with the crowd of people
putting in their orders, and she smirked with satisfaction at the thought of him returning to that spot by the door to find that she had
disappeared into the crowd. Of course, it wouldn't be long before he zeroed in on her, but by then she would have proved her point.
If this had been London, she thought with another of those pangs of regret, she could well and truly have lost herself. The
crowds and the darkness of a nightclub would have easily swallowed her up. Not so here. They had dimmed the lights but dark it
certainly was not and the crowds couldn't hide a fly for more than twenty minutes.
And if she had been with her friends& but she wouldn't have been with her friends at a nightclub. They would have been at
a smart wine bar or an expensive restaurant, swapping anecdotes about who was doing what at work, and at the back of her mind guilt
would have been nagging away that she had left Simon at night when she had been out all day. At least here she didn't feel guilty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]