Promoted: to Wife and Mother

‘I did,’ she said, her expression sad. ‘I compromised everything I believed about myself. I thought I was strong and independent and confident, and it was a shock to realise when I met Nick that I was ready to chuck all of that out of the window as long as I could be with him.’

Ed frowned. ‘Didn’t he love you?’

‘He said that he did,’ said Perdita, wondering how to explain Nick to a man like Ed, ‘but he was always afraid of committing himself to me.’

‘What, even after two years together?’

She bit her lip. It still wasn’t easy to think about how blindly she had believed in Nick, how determinedly she had closed her eyes to what she didn’t want to see. It hadn’t all been Nick’s fault.

‘Nick hadn’t been separated from his wife that long when I met him,’ she tried to explain. ‘He still felt guilty about splitting up the family, and he was very concerned about his two children, although they actually adapted to the new situation better than either of their parents.’

‘Were you the reason Nick and his wife separated?’ Ed made himself ask, and was relieved when Perdita shook her head.

‘No, there was nobody else involved. Their relationship had simply broken down and it had all got very nasty- and it went on to be even nastier with the divorce settlement going to court. I understood why Nick was wary of getting married again after that, but I didn’t mind. Getting married and having children of my own honestly wasn’t an issue for me. I just wanted to be with him,’ she said simply. ‘And when we were together, it was wonderful.’

Her expression was wistful and Ed poured himself a glass of wine to distract himself from it. He wasn’t enjoying hearing about how much she had loved bloody Nick at all.

‘What was the problem, then?’ he asked, conscious of an edge to his voice that shouldn’t have been there.

Still twisting the glass between her fingers, Perdita sighed. ‘Nick didn’t want us to live together. He thought it might be too difficult for his children to accept me at first, so initially I was introduced as a friend who went back to her own flat at the end of the day.

‘The custody arrangements were that Nick saw them one day a week and alternate weekends, but his ex-wife was constantly wanting to change the arrangements.’ Perdita’s mouth thinned at the memory. ‘I’m still sure she was just trying to make trouble between us. She used to go in for a lot of emotional blackmail, telling Sasha and Robin that Nick didn’t love them enough, didn’t want to see them, all that kind of nonsense, and Nick fell for it every time.’

She shook her head. ‘I’d tell him to just ignore her, but he would tie himself into knots trying to placate her because he believed that made life easier for the kids. Maybe he was right, I don’t know. All I know is that I was always the one pushed down his list of priorities. You wouldn’t believe how often we’d have something planned for the weekend and it would get changed at the last minute because Nick had agreed to do something with the children.’

Ed tried to imagine Perdita meekly accepting the way her plans were continually changed, but he just couldn’t do it. She was much too strong a person for that…wasn’t she?

But even the strongest people could be vulnerable, he knew, and love made you more vulnerable than anything else.

‘It sounds to me as if this Nick was jerking you around,’ he said bluntly, and Perdita lifted her shoulders in a strange gesture of defeat.

‘He wasn’t doing it deliberately, but yes, that was what was happening,’ she said. ‘And I put up with it.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘FORtwo years?’

Perdita winced at the incredulity in Ed’s voice. ‘That’s the reality of being involved with a single father,’ she said, feeling defensive as she always did when she talked about Nick. ‘I told myself that I had to accept it. I mean, it was right that he should put his children first. I wouldn’t want to be involved with a man who didn’t put his children first and take his responsibilities as a father seriously.

‘The trouble was that those responsibilities took up so much of his attention that there was none left over to deal with his responsibilities as half of a relationship,’ she went on after a pause. ‘There never seemed to be a time when it could just be about the two of us, and I began to resent the fact that I was the only one he didn’t think he had to make an effort for.’

‘He was taking you for granted, in fact?’

‘Yes,’ she said bleakly. It had taken her so long to get over Nick that it was depressing to even remember those days. ‘It sounds pathetic when I talk about it now, but you need to understand how much I loved Nick. I couldn’t imagine life without him, and so I bent over backwards to be accommodating. I tried to be understanding, and I completely accepted that his children came as part of the package, as it were, so I did my best to help make life easier for him.’

Perdita flushed, still faintly humiliated by the memory of how abject she had been. ‘I used to cook and clean and make cakes and do all that sort of stuff in the hope that Nick would start to think of me as a real part of his life but, instead of appreciating me, I think he just took it for granted that I’d always be there doing what was needed. He didn’t have to do anything to keep me there. I think he thought that letting me love him was all he needed to do-and I let him get away with that for too long.’

Ed was puzzled. Perdita seemed such a strong personality, and her face was full of character; it was hard to imagine her diminished by her love for this Nick, who sounded deeply selfish and complacent to Ed.

‘You’ve never struck me as a doormat type,’ he commented and she flushed.

‘I wasn’t myself. I was trying to be somebody else, somebody I thought Nick would want, but all I did was make a fool of myself. I was always waiting for things to improve, for Nick to be less stressed, for his job to settle down, for his wife to be less vindictive, but, after two years, I realised none of that was ever going to happen.’

‘So what was the point when you realised you’d had enough?’

‘My father died very suddenly a couple of years ago,’ she told him. ‘It was a terrible shock. He was always so…Well, anyway,’ she said briskly before she let the memories get the better of her. ‘My mother’s always had a very strong personality too, but she was distraught and it took my brothers a couple of days to get there.’

‘So you were holding it all together?’ Ed knew exactly how it felt to be the one who couldn’t let go, the one everyone else relied on to get them through the grief and the pain.

‘Well…yes…I suppose so,’ Perdita remembered. ‘I had to be strong for my mother, but I really wanted Nick to be there for me.’ Pain filled the expressive brown eyes before she looked away. ‘I asked him to come for the funeral. I told him I needed him but…’

‘He let you do it on your own,’ said Ed in a dangerously flat voice as she trailed off, and she nodded miserably.

‘His ex-wife wanted to go out and had asked him to have the kids that day and he didn’t feel that he could say no.’

Ed looked at Perdita’s averted face and swallowed the angry words that he really wanted to say. She didn’t need him to tell her what she already knew. How could Nick not have been there for her when she’d needed him so badly?

‘That must have hurt a lot,’ he said quietly instead.

‘Yes,’ she agreed on a long sigh, still unable to meet his eyes. The worst thing about remembering that time was how humiliated she had felt. People had kept asking where Nick was, and she had had to make excuses for him, when all she had wanted to do was to shout and to scream.

Drawing a breath, she forced a smile. Not a very good one, but still, a smile. ‘It made me realise that he might say that he loved me, but he didn’t really. Or at least he didn’t love me enough. Certainly not enough to show me that he did, or to think about what I needed for once, rather than about what he wanted and needed.’

‘Why did you put up with him for so long?’ Ed couldn’t help asking, brows drawn together in a ferocious scowl.