The Inward Storm. Penny Jordan
light, warmth flooded the pale apricot-painted room. Meg had been slightly dubious when Kate explained how she wanted to decorate the flat, but the shop property was Kate’s, bought with the mortgage she had raised when they first set up in business, and Meg had been generous in her praise when she saw the finished results.
Rusts, apricots and soft creams dominated the colour scheme, the cane furniture was glossed in the same apricot as the walls, the cushions covered in cream cotton with a rust and apricot design. The floorboards had been stained and a couple of beautifully soft sheepskin rugs were their only covering.
Meg disappeared into her bedroom, while Kate wandered into the kitchen, checking on the cottage pie. When she had lived in London she would have laughed at anything as homely as cottage pie. Orphaned very young, Kate had been brought up by a sophisticated godmother, many times divorced, who spent her life travelling from one glamour spot to another, trailing Kate in her wake as soon as she was old enough to leave school. It had been a hedonistic existence and one which Kate would have said she enjoyed … until she met Jake.
At first she had thought he was one of Lyla’s latest young men, but even at twenty she had dimly perceived that Jake lacked the malleability Lyla looked for in her handsome escorts. He was too hard, too ungiving to ever be at the beck and call of a woman like Lyla; pretty and vague as a butterfly. And Lyla had been nervous of him. Kate had sensed it that night at dinner. They had been staying in Cannes; they always spent June in Cannes, and she remembered that Lyla had introduced him with that girlish laugh of hers as ‘my stepson, darling … Jake Harvey.’ And Kate had realised that this Jake Harvey must be the son of one of Lyla’s many husbands. Lyla’s last venture into matrimony had ended just as Kate left school and she had long since forgotten the names of Lyla’s various husbands. Her heart had started to thump as Jake Harvey studied her, insolently, she thought as her heartbeat increased, her cheeks flushing as she realised the sexual speculation behind the ice-sharp grey glance.
‘Jake, you’re embarrassing the child,’ Lyla had said sharply, and he had smiled sardonically, relating leasing her from that hard grey imprisonment. She had wondered about him later that night when Lyla dismissed her, saying that she and Jake had business to discuss. Had his father looked anything like him? If so, no wonder the marriage hadn’t lasted long. For all his powerfully male good looks, the lean arrogant body that was so vibrantly masculine that even she had been aware of its potency, there was something about him that chilled and repelled her, a hardness of purpose perhaps, a taunting insistence that where he was concerned there was no other will but his. She would have been well advised to listen to those earlier misgivings, Kate sighed, when Meg emerged from her room, her face faintly flushed. ‘How do I look?’
Matt was taking her out to dinner, and Kate assured her that the silk blouse and velvet skirt she was wearing looked very attractive. ‘Not mutton dressed as lamb?’ she asked anxiously, grinning a little when Kate exploded into laughter and teased, ‘Definitely not! Matt would recognise that immediately, as a sheep farmer. Meg, you’re forty-five, not ninety,’ she added, sobering up a little.
‘But that still makes me old enough to be your mother,’ Meg reminded her dryly. ‘You’re the one who should be going out on dates, not me.’
‘No, thanks.’ Kate had her back to her, pretending to fiddle with the oven.
‘Kevin Hargreaves is keen on you, I’m sure,’ Meg pressed, mentioning their local doctor. ‘He must have telephoned you half a dozen times last week.’
‘That was just to arrange about the petition to stop any expansion of the nuclear plant,’ Kate told her firmly. ‘Oh, why do they want to expand it still more?’ she complained, her eyes bitter with hopelessness. ‘Don’t they realise the potential danger—not just for this valley, for possibly the whole country? Disarmament is the only way, and the politicians have got to be made to realise …’
‘Kate, I know how strongly you feel about all this,’ Meg told her softly, ‘but sometimes strong views can be blinkering. Have you thought how many jobs the plants provide? Without those jobs the valley would be almost bereft of young people. We have to find new forms of power for the future …’
‘New ways to maim and destroy,’ Kate said bitterly. It was an argument they had had often before. Meg didn’t share her views on nuclear disarmament, but Kevin Hargreaves did. Like her, he was keen to form a group of protesters against further expansion of the plant.
An hour later when she had eaten her shepherd’s pie and cleared away the dishes Kate sat down, intending to work on some fresh designs for their spring range, but her mind, normally so active, refused to be confined to the work in hand. Instead she found herself thinking about Jake; something she had not allowed herself to do except in brief snatches since their break-up. They should never have married in the first place, and, she suspected, had she been a more sophisticated twenty-one; had she not been living with Lyla, all they would have had would have been a brief affair. Jake had been at first disbelieving and then openly amused when he discovered her innocence. He had told her after they were married that once he did know he couldn’t leave her to be destroyed by the style of life Lyla enjoyed.
‘Such an intense, emotional little thing,’ he had said huskily in that deep voice he used when he was making love to her, the sound shivering across her aroused senses and barely impinging until much later. ‘Everything you feel, you feel so deeply …’
She had been a child to Jake; a child who had given herself trustingly to him, and who had married him without a thought of what marriage really entailed, living only for the times when he held her in his arms, turning her body to boneless, liquid fire. But the honeymoon couldn’t last for ever. He had a job to do, Jake had reminded her. That job had been at Greenham air-base, using his knowledge to perfect missiles which could destroy hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
She had been such an innocent. Kate shivered, remembering how angry Jake had been when he came home to find her studying the literature the anti-nuclear faction had put through their door. His anger had chilled her, as had his insistence that she throw the stuff away. It was almost as though he wouldn’t allow her to have any views that weren’t his; as though she were a mechanical doll designed purely for his pleasure and nothing else. And that had been how it had started. She had revolted against his veto, calling him a petty dictator and worse. That night he had made love to her with angry intensity and she had resisted him; not with her body—that was impossible—but with her mind. A chasm seemed to have opened up beneath her feet and with every day that passed it grew deeper and wider, until she no longer even wanted to cross it. She became involved with the Peace Movement, and Jake had been furious. How well she remembered the row they had had about it. If she had nothing better to do with her time than waste it with a bunch of hysterical women then he would give her something to keep her busy, he had stormed at her—a child.
And she had screamed back that a child of his was the last thing she wanted; that she would never give birth to the child of a man who felt as he did; that she would never have a child that could be destroyed by its father’s monstrous obsession with destruction. And so it had gone on, day after day, week after week, until that final row. It had been just before Christmas, the annual dance at the base. They had been invited, and she hadn’t wanted to go, but Jake had insisted. So she had gone, and it had been in a mood of burning resentment that she had responded to the overtures of some of the other guests and the base personnel, letting her views and hatred of what they were doing spill out into the silence that gradually grew in intensity until it reached Jake and they were staring at one another down the length of the room, antagonists in a bitter conflict in which there could be no end.
He had taken her home and she had trembled inwardly in fear and anger, but the words he had spoken were not those she had anticipated. He had stood in the door to their bedroom, watching her with cold eyes, and he had said simply, ‘This can’t go on. I married a child thinking she would mature into womanhood, but all she has done is regress into adolescent puerility. I’m leaving you, Kate. If you ever manage to grow up you can come and find me, but don’t expect me to hang around and wait.’ He had gone without another word, and she had left the house in the morning, driving north, not wanting to wait until he came back, in case