Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam Page A

But the reason for that was that he loved her, body and soul. It was because of the desperate depth of that love that he had lost control and spoken so spitefully to her during his call. She wanted to end it. He simply could not bear the thought that he had shared her willing company for the last time.
    Aware that it was the classic response of everyone who did what he just had, but unable to help himself doing it nonetheless, he found he was wishing with all his heart that he could turn back time and make the call again. Better still, he could not make the call at all until he had slept on his suspicions and was rested and sober. Sober, he would not have made that vindictive remark about her body signalling the ordeal of childbirth in its flaws.
    He closed his eyes. He groaned. He still had the phone in the grip of his hand. He was not just weak and stupid, he was unforgivably cruel. Lillian’s body was the more attractive for its curves and creases. They were features particular to her. The toned, anonymous, air-brushed perfection of a lap dancer’s physique did not do it for him. He had been there and tried that. When he had seen Lillian naked for the first time he had been beguiled precisely because she was so subtly imperfect and sweetly self-conscious and utterly unique. In her pale-eyed, honey-haired, fecund beauty, she was completely irresistible.
    Robert paced the marble floor of his sitting room. His Queenhithe penthouse had a commanding view of the Thames. He loved London. Every time he looked at the view from his balcony, it brought home his success with a fresh thrill of vindication. But he did not feel like looking at the view just at that moment. Across the river, a mile to the south-east, the woman he frankly adored was in her Bermondsey home thinking, at best, dismissive thoughts of him. Contemptuous was probably nearer the truth. He should take a sleeping pill and awaken in a few hours free of the fog of the booze and the febrile jitter of the coke; free of the tiredness of a night devoid of rest.
    He did not think it could be the husband. She had mentioned him vaguely. He had sounded dull and inconsequential to Robert; a talent-free man devoid of charisma who had hit the jackpot with his wife and then squandered his winnings. He hadn’t just sounded dull, actually. He had sounded terminally dull. Some problem with anxiety had sounded the most interesting aspect to his character. He was some kind of software design hotshot and this flaw had hampered his ability to present to potential clients and handicapped his progress in his career.
    Creativity was not a very democratic attribute. You possessed it or you didn’t. But Robert did not feel lucky in possessing his own talent. He had exploited it, working bloody hard. He was consistent and prolific. If he had not earned his talent, that was all right, because no one did. It was a gift. He felt, though, that he had justified the gift he had been given. And he felt that achievement made him special, singling him out, apart from the rest.
    The press release version of his life sold him as the Celtic product of picturesque Ennis in far-flung County Clare. It was a portrait misty with soft-water rain that dwelt on standing stones, peat-warmed cottages, the vastness of the Burren and the gaunt magnificence of the Cliffs of Moher. Had there been a soundtrack to it, Enya would have provided it. Or it would have been the Cranberries when they were still largely wistful and acoustic, before their antsy singer changed their sound.
    The reality was a council house on a miserable estate, an absentee father and a mother who regretted bitterly leaving rural Spain as a teenager for a man she quickly stopped loving. His early years had been bleak and lonely. It had not been a childhood for dwelling on nostalgically. It had been the sort you escaped. His talent had given him the means to escape it and his industry had done the rest, but he was intelligent enough to know that