A New Dream, Maggie Ford [books to read romance txt] 📗

the brim with fried breakfast food. Julia had often chided him that he ate like a navvy rather than someone educated at Oxford.

She put down her teacup. ‘You invest far too much, darling, far too rashly. Be careful.’

But he merely went on scanning his paper, muttering, ‘I do know what I’m doing.’

‘Are you sure?’ she ventured. ‘What if it all went wrong?’

He looked sharply at her. ‘It all depends on what you think could go wrong.’ Then, as if he had become aware of the connotation and was already regretting his words, his tone mellowed.

‘I can completely rely on my bank to look after my interests and I’ve always been given good advice by them. I’ve been a damned good customer of theirs all these years and they’ve never let me down.’

As he went back to studying the market Julia trickled some milk on to her cornflakes and took a small spoonful. But the cereal tasted like chaff in her mouth. From the time he’d found out about her foolish, if brief, affair, he’d not been the same man. Though he’d said little about it and – as the dramatists would have put it – taken her back, seldom did any term of endearment pass his lips.

Love making too had fallen by the wayside. Since she had mentioned two weeks ago the possibility of being pregnant, which now appeared to be a certainty, any move to cuddle up to him would reap a small kiss and be told it could be dangerous to make love in her condition. But was he thinking of the baby itself or whether in fact it was his? How did one ask such a question as that? She’d even found herself hoping the pregnancy was a false alarm, so that everything could slowly be forgotten. But it had not been forgotten and there seemed nothing to be done.

She needed to pour her heart out to someone. Stephanie would not care and it was unfair to worry Ginny just now. She telephoned James at his bank and he agreed to meet her for lunch at Lyons Corner House.

‘We’re not happy,’ she told him bleakly. ‘I’d be better leaving him. I can’t take much more of the tension that’s come between us.’

James, solid and serious-minded, stirred his coffee at length while all around came the busy chatter of others at lunch. ‘Why should there be any tension?’ he asked finally. ‘You’ve been together for years and now you’re married, you should be ecstatic, so what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t quite know,’ she said, stopping abruptly as a Lyon’s nippy came with the ham sandwiches James had ordered.

‘Yes you do,’ he prompted severely as the waitress departed and Julia realized he’d detected the lie in her tone.

She let the minutes tick by, helping herself to a sandwich merely for something to do while debating whether or not to tell him the truth. But she had to say something, had to own up. After all, she needed help. ‘I suppose it is my fault.’

She broke off, waiting for him to prompt her. When he didn’t, she knew there was no going back.

‘A few months ago,’ she began, ‘I met a face from the past, someone we all knew.’ She was going to have to say it: ‘Chester Morrison.’

She heard James draw in an annoyed breath but hurried on before he could say anything, running quickly through the story of having coffee, meaning to humiliate him, but then forgiving him and beginning to think of him as an old friend. But sooner or later the truth was going to have to come out if she needed his advice.

She continued, telling James how she had begun to meet Chester regularly and how she had begun to find herself becoming a little infatuated with him. Telling her brother how their relationship had begun slowly to develop was the hardest thing she had ever done.

‘I became completed carried away. I think I fell in love all over again – at least I thought I had. Then out of the blue he told me he was going back to his wife. I was shocked. I felt so betrayed that I created a scene there in the street.’

‘You felt betrayed!’ James broke in cruelly. ‘What about Simon?’

Julia fell silent, abashed by the truth. Tears sprang to her eyes. She bit at her lip, trying to stem them. When she finally made herself reply, her voice trembled so that she could hardly say the words that came pouring from her.

‘I know I’m to blame. But Chester and I, we didn’t do anything, I was just drawn to him because Simon and I weren’t married at the time, with no sign of us ever getting married, and I’d got tired of waiting. I just think I was caught on the rebound. I was very low.’

It didn’t matter whether or not there was truth in all she said, only that she needed to say it. ‘I’ve been a fool, I know. But honestly, nothing went on between us, but Simon only sees that I’ve been unfaithful.’

‘But he married you.’

‘I know. I think he only did it because he wanted to make things right. He’s that kind of person. He says he still loves me, but it’s only what he says.’

‘Have you thought that he does truly love you, in spite of what you did?’

‘But it’s not just that, James. I think I might be carrying. If I am it’s Simon’s baby because Chester and I made sure to take…’ She broke off, then finished, ‘We did nothing.’

She saw James compress his lips. ‘It’s the truth!’ she burst out. ‘But Simon’s behaving as if it isn’t; as if it’s not his child, and that’s why I can’t stay with him.’

Her voice fell away and she lowered her head in shame. ‘It’s best I leave,’ she said. ‘But it’s not what I want,’ she added miserably in the same shaky voice, tears now pouring down her cheeks, making fellow customers at