Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam

the priority and both she and James were doing everything necessary to accommodate that.
    She had not told Robert about the assault on her son. It had seemed an intimacy too far. Given that she had slept with him, this was probably sanctimonious and certainly contradictory. But telling him would have felt wrong, an invitation to somewhere in her life and heart he had simply never been welcome. Besides, she had made up her mind, hadn’t she? Or her mind had been made up for her. The threat to the integrity of her family inflicted by the attack on Jack had made her decide to end her involvement with Robert at that moment in the hospital room.
    Since that moment, Robert had existed only in the past tense for her. But he had not known it when he had rung her half an hour earlier.
    He had not risen early. That was not his style and he had, of course, no children of his own whose timetable he was obliged to accommodate. Instead, he had been up all night. He had been drinking and brooding and for all she knew doing a few lines of coke to give his thought processes the illusion of clarity. Paranoia had prompted the call. He suspected her of neglecting him because someone competing for her attentions had roused her libido and claimed her heart.
    Libido had not entered into it. Heart had, though. Robert had been right about that. And he had known she was no longer interested as soon as she had begun to respond to his plaintive imploring and his silly accusations and the puerile insults that had followed. He had said something cutting about the imperfections childbirth had inflicted upon her body. He could have said nothing that would have done more harm to his own hopeless cause. She was proud of being a mother and proud too of looking like one.
    Threats had followed the insults. And they had alarmed her. She thought it ironic that a man who made his living writing children’s books could be victim to such personal immaturity. But she did not have time to indulge in irony. Instead, she had found herself pleading with him to stay silent, to say and do nothing that would embarrass and expose her and jeopardise her family life.
    Feigning indifference would have been a better tactic. But she was not a poker player. The call had taken her by surprise. And anyway, she knew with dismay and the bitterest regret that Robert was not someone she could ever have really trusted to keep his word. He lived like the indulged adult infant he was. He took what he wanted. When the toy he coveted lay behind the window of a closed shop, he was the sort who smashed the glass and took it anyway. Just the desire for something signified ownership.
    Upstairs her children, in their shared warmth, lay drowsing together on the verge of sleep. ‘Tell me your dream, Livs,’ Jack said.
    ‘It was night time,’ Olivia said. ‘And I was on a beach. And the sea was singing.’

Chapter Four
     
    Robert O’Brien did not want to let himself off so lightly as to blame his performance on the phone either on the booze or the coke. Fatigue had also played a part, but he was not at all in the mood to mitigate his own offence. He had initiated the call. Then he had handled the call very badly on every single count. He had suspected that Lillian was, for whatever reason, having doubts about their affair. But instead of trying to discover the reason for those doubts, he had harangued and insulted and finally threatened her.
    Her interpretation would be that he had revealed his true colours and they were all of an unattractive hue. She would come to that conclusion because for her, their affair was a casual diversion; no more than a bit of sexual adventure with a good-looking and slightly younger man. Ending it exacted no emotional cost. It was something she could take or leave and the time had come to bid him and their relationship farewell.
    It could not be more different for him, he thought. The sex was good with Lillian; the sex was, in fact, the best he had ever had.