‘You win, Marcus. I’m probably insane. But yes, I will marry you.’
They had not started the main course. He said nothing in reply. With a wave of his hand he gestured for the bill and paid it. His eyes were inside her head again, inside her body, drilling deep into her. She knew what was going to happen. She felt the old crazy excitement mounting. He took her by the hand and led her from the restaurant. Just down the street there was an alleyway leading to the riverside and he half dragged her into it. ‘We’ll get mugged,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’
He led her down the alley until it turned abruptly to the left, into a dead end with the Thames on one side and a disused warehouse on the other. In a shadowed corner away from the glow of the moon, there was a boarded-up window with a wide stone ledge. He backed her against it and lifted her on to the ledge — it was just the right height. Vaguely she thought it was bound to be filthy and that would be the end of her Saint Laurent suit. His eyes did not leave her face as he plunged into her. No preamble. No need. Animal. Basic. He was urgent in her, still staring unblinking at her. Deadly serious.
‘From now on this is for you. Only you. No more games. Just you and me and this. Because it can only be like this for us.’
His words were staccato. It was over very quickly. He was making a point, he was consummating their new engagement. It was like shaking hands on a deal. The thought made her giggle. He was the only man she had ever had sex like that with. In a daft sort of way it was special to them, had been since the scramble by the dustbins at her school all those years ago.
Fourteen
When they got back to his apartment Marcus apologised. Jennifer thought it was the first time she had ever heard him apologise for anything. And she had never seen him look so nervous. She realised how afraid he was of losing her again. He was afraid she had been offended by his alley antics. She had reassured him that she could never resist his gut sexiness — that had been his first appeal to her and it was not going to go away. They were two of a kind. It was just that this time there had to be limits or they would destroy themselves and their relationship. He knew what she meant.
The skirt of her Saint Laurent suit, which had started the day a pale lemon colour, was indeed ruined — its seat now covered in grime. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. I’ll buy you the shop,’ he said.
‘Flash bugger,’ she replied.
But for the first time the thought crossed her mind that he probably could buy the shop if he wished. Extraordinary.
She never did go back to New York. Marcus’s divorce came through with the kind of smoothness Jennifer knew to expect from him. They were married in the West Indies in the winter of 1987.
‘I told you Lady Pamela never stood a bloody chance,’ said Anna McDonald. ‘And you owe me two lunches at the Connaught. One to cancel out the one I bought you when you married poor old Michael, and the other to settle our bet. I always knew I’d win in the end...’
Uncomfortably aware that her mother deserved far better, Jennifer had told Margaret Stone of her marriage plans on the telephone. ‘Yes, of course I understand you wanting to go away on your own to get married,’ her mother had said, while quite clearly not understanding at all. ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing this time. It would make a change, I’m sure...’
The lawyer lover and the New York apartment were all dispensed with by remote control. Jack at the Globe agreed to have Jennifer back in London as Features Editor, creating a vacancy to do so and pretending not to notice that she had more or less walked out of New York. But then, she was known in Fleet Street for having an impetuous streak, and only a combination of considerable talent and her likeableness allowed her to get away with it. Also Anna was absolutely spot-on right — Jack did indeed adore her, and who knew what other forces were working for her, thanks to Marcus? Even then that thought did occur to her.
One way and another it was an extremely neat operation. It would be, of course: Marcus was a neat man both physically and mentally. His house, his office, even his desk, were always immaculate, and so, Jennifer suspected, was the order of his mind. He never liked mess or loose ends. But she’d had enough of living in America anyway. London was home.
In the sunny splendour of Barbados’s Sandy Lane Hotel they drank too many rum punches and planned their new life together. They would have a baby before it was too late, maybe more than one. They were both ready. On returning to England they bought the house on Richmond Hill. It had plenty of room for a family. Once again they were the media world’s golden couple, only this time even more so.
Two years passed relatively uneventfully and things were still pretty good. But Marcus had changed in many ways. At first Jennifer was sure he was being faithful to her sexually, yet there was so much she did not know about his world. Just as before, he would sometimes disappear for hours on end, maybe a whole day, and nobody in his office ever knew where he was. She asked him about his Freemasonry and he admitted readily enough that, yes indeed, the Masons demanded a great deal of his time nowadays, especially since he was apparently now a member of several lodges and a grand master of more than one. But still she felt uneasy. A few times he said he was embarking on business trips abroad and she discovered by chance that his stories just did not add up. He told her that his business interests were so complex now he could not begin to explain, he could not stop to take anyone else on board. She accepted it more or less because she couldn’t face a confrontation and, looking back, she realised that she had not wanted to rock the boat. She had not wanted there to be anything amiss, she had not wanted another broken marriage. But she was uneasy. His telephone had a scrambler on it, for God’s sake, and, he never failed to take most of his calls behind a firmly closed door as far away from her as possible — just as he had from the very beginning of their relationship. But perhaps all men at his level of success needed to be discreet about their work, she thought to herself. He remained as plausible as ever. You didn’t discuss deals worth millions of pounds on open, unscrambled lines, he said, and there were some kinds of business so delicate and confidential that you did not allow anyone to overhear — not even your wife.
Frequently she would walk into a room when he was talking on the telephone and he would immediately hang up. Once or twice she picked up the phone when it rang and there would be no one at the other end. Classic signs of an affair. But she wanted desperately to trust him. She had thrown in her lot with him.
Their sex life remained as exceptional as it had always been. It was almost twenty years since they had first been together, and their desire for each other was as great as ever. Unusual, she thought. But in spite of the quality and frequency of their lovemaking, Jennifer did not become pregnant. Eventually she went to her gynaecologist for tests. Nothing indicated any reason why she should not have a child, but she was thirty-six years old and her body clock was ticking away.
‘It’ll happen sooner or later, darling, you’ll see,’ Marcus reassured her.
It didn’t happen and eventually her doctors asked to test Marcus. He agreed easily enough; it did not seem to occur to him that the problem might really be his.