‘Hope,’ he said more reasonably, ‘I know you’re cross with me, but please, tell me what’s wrong. What have I done that makes you want to find fault with everything I say and do?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she managed to say.
‘Yes you do. You haven’t been yourself for some weeks.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve noticed you’ve been smoking more too. You’re not . . . it’s not a recurrence of—’
Despite the softness of his tone now, or maybe because of it and what it implied, fury pulsed through her. ‘Do not patronise me, Edmund,’ she retorted peevishly. ‘Don’t ever treat me like one of your simpering hypochondriac female patients! And so what if I am smoking more? Do not presume to lecture me!’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘I’m only asking if—’
‘If I’m having one of my episodes? I assure you I’m not.’
He shook his head with a weariness that added to her infuriation. He didn’t believe her. Didn’t believe that she could be perfectly all right. In his opinion, if she was behaving ‘oddly’, it could be only one thing, that she was succumbing to the dreaded ‘black dog’.
That was the trouble with being married to a doctor; they always thought they knew best. She saw it all the time in the village, all those pathetically needy women putting their beloved Dr Flowerday on a pedestal, hanging on his every word.
Time was she had been proud of the adoration he instilled in his patients, proud too of the way everyone spoke so highly of him. But since that first letter had arrived, and now a second, she viewed the devotion of his patients as cloying. Now if she heard anyone saying what a truly special doctor he was, or how lucky she was to be married to such an exceptional man, she wanted to scream at them that he was nothing of the sort. He was a lying cheating husband!
‘Hope,’ he said, cutting short the flow of her thoughts, ‘it’s been a tiring time for us recently, what with selling our old home, staying at Island House and then moving here. It’s a lot of upheaval and I know you don’t like change, not when all you want to do is focus your energy on your writing. I know how important that is to you. I really do.’
‘I told you I’m fine,’ she said flatly.
‘Why then is it that I can’t open my mouth without you criticising me?’
‘Maybe you should take a look at yourself and wonder why that might be. Now please, are you going to help with these books, or are you going to continue standing there hindering me?’
He stared at her. ‘You clearly have something in mind that I’ve done, or not done, so why not do the decent thing and just tell me what it is?’
She wanted to. She really did. But what was the point? He would only deny it. Or worse, admit what he’d been doing. To hear him confess his deceit would be too much to bear.
The ringing of the telephone out in the hall called a halt to their conversation. ‘Answer it then,’ snapped Hope as he continued to stare at her. ‘It’ll be for you. It’s always for you.’
With a sigh, Edmund left the room, closing the door after him. Seconds later it opened, and he poked his head around the door. ‘I have to go. That was Miss Gant saying Miss Treadmill is having chest pains. Can we talk later, when I’m back?’
She gave an indifferent shrug of her shoulders, not caring how he might interpret it. When he’d gone and she heard his car driving away, she hurled the book in her hands across the room. It was only a few months ago, while still living in their old house, that on a bright and sunny day she had taken Edmund outside, telling him to keep his eyes closed until she said he could open them. Handing him the keys to a new Jaguar Mk 2, the very model he had said he’d love to own, she’d said, ‘Take it for a spin, to be sure that it lives up to your expectations.’
‘Of course it will!’ he’d said delightedly, his face wreathed in boyish pleasure. ‘But I don’t deserve it.’
No, she thought now, you don’t deserve it, Edmund, you bloody well don’t!
To stop herself crying again as she remembered so vividly her happiness at buying something she had known Edmund wanted, she clenched her fists and rammed them against her eyes.
When did it all go wrong? They’d been happy once, hadn’t they? Or had their relationship been a mistake from the start? Had Edmund only ever felt sorry for her? Had he regarded her as a grieving widow to whom he could minister and make whole again?
Despite the cold of the day and the fading light, she went out to the hall, then along the corridor to the boot room where she threw on her old mackintosh. Pushing her feet into her rubber boots and then searching for a headscarf, she called to Heather in the kitchen that she was going for a walk.
She needed to think. She needed to decide what she was going to do. If she confronted Edmund, she had to accept that he might confess the truth to her. And if he did, she had to know what her reaction would be. Could she forgive him if he promised never to betray her again, or would it always be there between them, an impenetrable barrier? Could she ever trust him again? And was it her fault he had strayed? Was she simply too dull for Edmund?
Stomping along the lane, the wind whipping the leaves from the trees, and her hair working itself loose from the headscarf she’d tied under her chin, she thought back to the night of the party at Meadow Lodge. She recalled the way Edmund had enjoyed himself dancing that absurd dance called the twist. He had been so uninhibited, the exact opposite to her. She could never dance that way.
Her brother Kit had been his usual sweet self to her that night and, in his customary easy-going manner, had dismissed the idea that the poison pen letter she had been sent was anything but a case of village mischief-making. He’d told her not to give it another thought, which was so typical of him. He always did tend to put his head in the sand.
Had she done something similar during the years she had been married to Edmund? Had she subconsciously known something was wrong, but refused to face it by burying herself in her work?
The accusation in the letter that she had neglected her husband bit deep. But the truth always did hurt. She had told Kit the night of the party that she believed herself to be a failure as a wife, and while at the time she had made the comment out of self-pity, she now had to accept that she had indeed been a failure. Why else had Edmund gone elsewhere to satisfy himself?
It was almost dark, she suddenly realised, her eyes having grown accustomed to the gathering dusk. The presence of lights softly glowing from the cottages ahead of her brought about this awareness. She ought to turn around and go home, but she couldn’t face it. Not yet. Not even to what was meant to be their dream home. Instead, and pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, she trudged on in the gloom, the cold wind slicing through her.