Deception and Desire (36 page)

At nineteen the news had not affected Van very deeply. Once he knew his virility would not be impaired he had shrugged his shoulders and looked on the bright side – what a stud he could become if he did not have to worry about leaving a string of illegitimate progeny in his wake! But as he matured he had found that there was a certain hollowness in knowing he would never father a child. Not for him the chance to pass on a family business as his own father hoped to do. What he achieved must be done in his lifetime and what he did he must do for himself, not for his descendants.

Because he was strong and single-minded Van adopted this philosophy and made it his own. He had no time or energy to waste on bitterness or regret for something which could not be changed. But there remained within him a small sensitive spot which reacted with illogical violence to any reminder of his own inability to fulfil man's intended role in the scheme of things and procreate. It made him angry, anger not directed at himself or the illness that had robbed him of his fertility, but an anger that was all the more frustrating and destructive because it lacked a focus. It seethed and boiled in his blood, knotted in his stomach, crawled just beneath his skin. He could not father a child. But Dinah – his Dinah – had found someone who could. She had slept with this unknown man who possessed what he, Van, lacked, and all the time they had been together his seed had been growing inside her.

Van stubbed out his cigar. He wanted to be sick. His senses were numbed a little by shock, but he knew that when it began to wear off there would be layer upon layer of pain. Yet at the same time, in spite of his horror and revulsion, he knew he still wanted Dinah, even more, if that were possible, than he had before. He loved her, needed her with a desperation he had never expected to experience. He needed her as a man, with his heart and with his body. And he also needed her as the inspiration for everything he hoped to achieve professionally. The combination was compelling; he knew there was no point in fighting against it, no point weighing odds or considering anything but the demands of fate. She was his destiny, whether he liked it or not, and he was hers. They had been meant for each other, flaws and all – useless to do anything but try to make the best of it.

Van wound down the windows of the Jag and took a few deep breaths of fresh air. It was scented with the sweetness of summer, with cow parsley and hot, dry grass. He knew, as he smelled that particular combination, that it would ever after remind him of this moment.

Leaving the window down he started the engine. Then he turned the car back the way he had come.

Dinah was upstairs, in the little front bedroom that Mary was allowing her to use.

She had been feeling dreadfully tired and drained the last few days, and she had taken to going to her room and lying down for half an hour, supposedly to read. But she couldn't concentrate on reading, she couldn't concentrate on anything. The words blurred in front of her eyes and her thoughts churned until she thought she was going mad.

What was she going to do? Mary was quite right, she had to make plans and it wasn't fair to expect Mary to make them for her – she had her own life to get on with. Perhaps, Dinah thought, she had been wrong to impose on Mary at all, but she hadn't known what else to do. She had had to get away from Van and there had been nowhere else to go, no one to turn to. And somehow she hadn't been able to face striking out alone again as she had done when she left college. Then she had been worried, but positive. Now she felt frightened and panicky and very, very lost.

And this awful tiredness didn't help.

Did everyone feel like this? Dinah wondered. If so, how did women who had other children to cope with manage? But perhaps it was just her, perhaps there was something wrong. She still hadn't seen a doctor to tell her otherwise. A tiny nugget of hope flared at the back of her mind. Perhaps she was going to lose the baby. That would solve everything. She would be free and everything would go back to being as it had been before.

Except of course that it wouldn't. Nothing could ever be the same again.

Tears filled Dinah's eyes. If only she had met Van before any of this happened! That was ridiculous, of course. If she hadn't become pregnant she would never have met him at all – she would still be at college. And it was no use wasting energy thinking like that. She had to pull herself together, face the doctor and the social workers, decide where to have the baby, where she was going to live afterwards and how she was going to support them both. But she simply did not know where to begin and lacked the will to try.

Dinah got up from the bed and crossed to the window, sitting on the floor with her elbows resting on the sill, staring out at the hot, dusty August afternoon. Her stomach felt heavy and uncomfortable; strange when she thought how well she had managed to conceal it until now – since she had been at Mary's it seemed to have increased in size overnight, but perhaps it was just that she was not making the effort any more.

She heard a car turn into the street and looked towards it listlessly. A Jag – like Van's. The pain in her heart was sharp and insistent, just above the place where she sometimes felt the flutter that she knew was the baby.

The car came to a stop outside the house. Dinah's breath caught in her throat, the first stirring of realisation affecting her physically long before her mind had registered the truth. The door was opening, a man was getting out. Van! Dear God it wasn't just a car
like
Van's – it was Van! She leapt to her feet in a flurry. He mustn't see her like this – she couldn't bear it! This horrible cotton shift dress straining over her bulge, her hair – oh God, just look at her hair, what a mess! In fact, did she want to see him at all? Should she hide, lock the door, pretend she was asleep, anything, anything, until he went away again?

The panic rushed up at her, she felt it mounting in her in a hot flood tide, but her hands were icy cold, her legs shaking, weak and useless.

Dinah thought: I've got to sit down! But suddenly the bed looked a dreadfully long way away. She took a step towards it. The room swam around her. Another step, but it was like walking in water. Her legs buckled beneath her and she sank, quite gracefully, to the floor.

She could hear Mary's voice calling to her – ‘Dinah! Dinah!' – but it sounded a very long way off. Then there was another voice,
his
voice, and she somehow knew that the hand holding hers belonged to him. Her eyelids fluttered, the mists cleared a little. She opened her eyes fully and he was there, the face she loved close to hers. Oh Van, Van …

Mary was holding a glass to her lips. Brandy. The smell of it made Dinah feel a little sick.

‘No …' She pushed the glass away.

‘Have some water,' Van said.

It was luke warm, from the carafe beside her bed which she kept there because she often woke in the night and needed a drink and which she had forgotten to empty this morning. But it moistened her lips and revived her a little, though she still leaned back heavily against his arm.

‘What are you doing here?' she asked muzzily.

He wiped a trickle of water from her chin with his finger.

‘I've come to take you home,' he said.

They were married by special licence three weeks later in a registry office ceremony, because it created less fuss and in any case Dinah could not face a place of worship. Her grandfather, who was her legal guardian since she was not yet twenty-one, refused his permission, so they had to apply to the courts to reverse his decision and then he refused to attend the ceremony. Only Van's parents and Mary, Bob and little Patrick were there to see them make their vows. Dinah looked utterly beautiful in a twenties-style dress of cream silk that skimmed her thickening figure, and though she was still pale her skin had the incandescence of happiness.

Van's parents were less happy. They liked Dinah well enough, but a pregnant twenty-year-old machinist was hardly the bride they would have chosen for their son. Christian Senior had had a few choice words with Van about the whole affair, particularly since he assumed they were going to have to live in the family home, for the time being at least. As a result Van found a suitable house to rent within easy reach of the factory whilst negotiations went on for a permanent home. On the day, however, they put their very real doubts to one side and managed to smile for the wedding group photographs. In fact, Van's mother, looking at Dinah's shining face, wondered if perhaps she had been wrong to worry. The girl was beautiful and sweet and Van looked like a man who had everything he could wish for. Kissing her new daughter-in-law on the cheek, she prayed that he would continue to feel that way.

Dinah was eight months pregnant when Van knew for certain that he could never accept another man's baby as his own.

When he had returned to Mary's house that day in August nothing had mattered to him but having Dinah back with him, and when he had seen her lying on the floor of the cramped little bedroom he had known that whatever the circumstances he wanted only to marry her, take her home and look after her. The child she was expecting seemed unreal, not even a consideration, and in the excitement of arranging the wedding and finding somewhere for them to live he had scarcely given it a second thought. But as she became more obviously pregnant his revulsion began to return, just a slight twinge at first, then growing day by day until it became an obsession.

Had Van been an introspective man he might have realised that he had not given himself time to adjust to the situation as it was in reality before making his decision to marry Dinah with all it entailed. But Van was not introspective any more than he was cautious. He acted swiftly and sometimes rashly and he had little time for the faint of heart or the fence-sitter. Van the entrepreneur, the man of action, was curiously lacking in imagination; he acted on instinct, sometimes blundering blindly after what he wanted with no thought for the consequences. This impetuous side of his nature often brought spectacular success, but equally it occasionally brought disaster. As the time for Dinah's baby to be born drew closer Van knew without a doubt that this was one of the latter occasions. The sight of her swollen body was anathema to him. He did not think he would have liked it very much even if it had been his baby she was carrying; as it was it was much worse, a constant reminder that there had been someone else.

Dinah had tried to tell him once about the way it had been but he had retorted, rather harshly, that he did not want to know. It was true, he did not, but it ate away at him just the same. He became irritated by her bulk, by her seeming inability to be comfortable in a chair, in the car, in bed, and by her constant tiredness. He no longer wanted to take her in his arms and feel that monstrously swollen belly pressed against him. He could not bear to see her naked. He thought of how she had insisted on making love in the dark on that sweet stolen holiday and how he had planned to show her how to enjoy seeing as well as touching – what irony! Now it was he who wanted to make very sure that her body was under wraps. Once he had come into the bedroom and caught her in the act of putting on her nightdress, and the sight of her swollen breasts and distended stomach had seemed to him grotesque contrasted with her still slim and shapely legs.

‘For goodness' sake, Dinah!' he had snapped. ‘Do you have to?'

He had seen the hurt flare in her eyes but it had not moved him. He was too concerned with his own feelings. That night he slept in his dressing room. From that day on Dinah had been careful to dress and undress without a moment's nakedness, in his presence at least. But even her modesty was irritating to him.

He began working longer and longer hours, but there was little satisfaction at work either. His father was taking an entrenched attitude over the footwear he and Dinah had designed – he had agreed to produce a few pairs of the walking boots, but positively refused even to consider the sandals.

‘They are right outside our line,' he said. ‘ It's not the way I want to go.'

Had he been feeling less truculent Van might have considered that getting the walking boots into production was at least fifty per cent success for his scheme and been satisfied to leave it at that for the time being. As it was he saw only that his father was again frustrating him.

‘We have to diversify and the sandals are an excellent way of doing that. They won't even cost much to make since they use up oddments.'

‘They will also use up the time of men who are better employed doing what they know. And what about the soles? They can't be cut from scraps. I don't want to do it, Christian.'

‘Father, we need a second string if we are ever to grow.'

‘Grow? Who wants to grow? This is a good business we have here, just the right size.'

‘Tin-pot.'

‘I beg your pardon? If that is how you feel about it, Christian, I suggest you go away and start your own business. I won't be told how to run mine by anyone, least of all my own son, who has benefited from it all his life.'

Van sighed. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘I should think so too! You have hurt me, Christian. One day perhaps your son will do the same and then you will know how I feel. It is not nice, being criticised and told what to do by one's own son.'

Van winced. ‘ I shall never have a son,' he wanted to say. ‘It is not my child Dinah is carrying.' He did not; the question had never been raised at home and he knew that his parents assumed that the doctors had been wrong when they had said he was infertile. They thought, quite naturally, that the baby was his, and he had been too proud to correct the mistaken assumption. But his father's comment reminded him cruelly that the child was not his and that he did not want it. He could not bear the thought of having to see it every day of his life, could not bear to share his home – and his Dinah – with this unwanted intruder. He would be an appalling father, he knew, directing all his resentment at the cuckoo in the nest. He did not want to have to care for some other man's child and he was certainly not going to hand his life's work on to him. He hated the baby now and he would hate it even more when it was there, demanding love and attention and money. Perhaps in the end he would even hate Dinah for foisting it on to him. The fact that he had married her knowing about the baby made no difference. He could not – would not – take the charade any further than he had to.