Jennifer came home late one night to find him slumped over the kitchen table with a nearly empty whisky bottle by his side. It was the first time she had ever seen him really drunk. Marcus did not like to lose control. Except in bed. He stirred when she entered the room.
‘Wanna drink?’
She nodded and then sat down opposite him. He poured fine malt whisky into a crystal tumbler. Even in despair, Marcus would never allow his standards to drop. Not Marcus. She knew something was very wrong. She waited for him to speak.
‘You’re not gonna bloody believe this,’ he said finally. ‘I’m bloody sterile.’
His eyes were red and swollen. She realised he had been crying. She instinctively reached forward and held his hand.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
They both knew it did. Probably more to him than to her, as it happened.
‘Biggest, horniest bloody dick in bloody town and it’s bloody useless,’ he muttered angrily. ‘Bang bloody bang. An’ all I fire is bloody blanks.’
It was after that that things started to go wrong.
The matter was never discussed again. Nor were any alternatives like adoption. Marcus hardly ever seemed to want to talk to her about anything. He had a grimness about him that she had not been aware of before. For the first time ever the sexual chemistry between them began to let them down. Sometimes Marcus would come home very late and sleep in one of the spare rooms, saying that he had not wanted to wake her. She had been determined that this time she would remain faithful within her marriage. There really was little point in remarrying in your mid-thirties unless that was your intention. But she did stray once or twice. Not because she craved further sexual excitement, but because she felt so alone, so isolated. The emotional side of her relationship with Marcus had always been a little strange. There was no doubt of its strength. But it was all so closely entangled with the sexual magnetism between them. Love was not a word often mentioned. Jennifer had once told Anna that, when she finally married Marcus, her strongest feeling had been one of inevitability. It was her destiny, and whether she loved him or not, and of course she supposed she did, was irrelevant.
When they ultimately parted she experienced the same feeling of inevitability. Probably the way in which it happened was inevitable too. She had become pretty sure that Marcus was again indulging in sexual activities she would rather not know about. But nothing had prepared her for the revelations on that grey, chill October night in 1992.
She had to travel to Paris to negotiate the buy-up of a big Royal scoop with a French magazine, and she was booked on the last flight out of Heathrow. Minutes after the flight was called there was a bomb scare and the entire airport was cleared. She waited an hour or so in the nearby Hilton Hotel and finally decided she had had enough. She would take a taxi home to sleep in her own bed, and catch the first flight the next day.
As her key turned in the latch she sensed that things were not as they should be. The hall was dark but there was a dim light showing through the cracks around the closed door to the living room. It was what she could hear that had turned her blood cold. High-pitched squeals, sobbing, and rhythmic grunting. She threw open the door.
A startled Marcus turned around so that he was looking straight at her. The expression on his face horrified her. His eyes looked crazed. His lips were pulled back over his teeth so that he seemed to be snarling, sweat was pouring from him, the muscles of his neck were bulging with his exertions. He was naked, and leaning over the sofa before him were two young Oriental girls, who were also naked. Marcus was still thrusting into the backside of one of them. Even as he looked into the horrified eyes of his wife, he could not stop his body carrying on with what it was doing. The girls also turned to look at Jennifer, and their faces showed pain and fear. They were weeping. Marcus had later claimed they were at least sixteen, but Jennifer remained sure that they were even younger. They were physically tiny and she knew how big Marcus was.
Jennifer took in the whole sordid scene in seconds. Still clutching her overnight bag for the Paris trip, she bolted for the front door, slammed it behind her, and ran to the Porsche parked in the driveway. Although she had used taxis for her original journey to the airport, she found to her relief that her car keys were in her pocket. Hastily she unlocked the car door, slid behind the wheel, tossing her bag onto the passenger seat, crashed the gears into reverse and roared out of the drive backwards and at speed. She was fortunate that for a brief moment there were no passing vehicles on the road behind the house. Had there been, she would have smashed straight into them, because she had not looked in any direction. As she gunned the car forwards with a clumsy lurch, she was vaguely aware of the front door to the house flying open and a frantic Marcus, precariously clutching an unbuttoned overcoat around his nakedness, tearing down the drive behind her. Too late. Much too late for everything.
She drove back to the Airport Hilton and arranged parking for her car for the duration of the two-day Paris trip. She booked a room for the night, plugged in to a house video and ordered a large meal and a bottle of good claret on room service. She refused to think about what she had just witnessed. All she knew was that this time it really was over between her and Marcus. She did not want to see him again as long as she lived. The man was depraved, and the terrible thing was that she had always suspected it. She had parted from him once before because she was afraid of what he could lead her into. Now she knew that Marcus Piddell could never have taken her halfway towards the depths he was capable of.
Marcus had just been elected a Member of Parliament in her beloved West Country. As usual he had sailed through it, and she had played her role of politician’s wife pretty well too. Yuk. She thought back to the weeks of canvassing. Marcus had stayed in Durraton for the duration and she had travelled down from London every weekend, to stand smilingly alongside him in draughty village halls, even knocking on doors. He was good at the campaigning, and also he had a true knowledge of the West Country. She’d hoped that he would turn out to be a good constituency MP. And certainly, along with his parents and her mother, she had been briefly very proud of Marcus. In spite of all his extraordinary success in the city, and his rise to becoming a newspaper tycoon, it still meant a great deal to him to be given this kind of recognition in the place where he grew up. Jennifer had found his undisguised joy quite disarming, and had shared every moment of his jubilation. Now she wondered what sort of man she had helped into a position of such potential power. Because the one thing she had been sure of from the moment he won the seat was that Marcus would not be content to stay on the back benches for long.
After she had eaten as much of the food as she wanted and drunk most of the claret, Jennifer reached for the phone to call Anna — it was a lifetime’s habit. Then she replaced the receiver in its cradle. What was she going to tell her oldest friend? She had no wish to share even with Anna what she had witnessed that night.
She undressed, climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head. Strangely she slept quite well, and in the morning, professional to the last, she flew to Paris and negotiated a tough deal. On her return, she found herself a smart service flat in Kensington, and wrote to Marcus telling him she would be paying for it with his credit card until they had sorted out their affairs. She wanted a divorce and she wanted it fast.
Marcus had prevaricated. He had pestered her much as before when she had left him. By his standards he positively grovelled. Certainly he made the same old promises, and told her how much he needed her. He would not discuss divorce.