Cat and Mouse by Tim Vicary

way she had behaved at other times, in other places . . . Oh God no don't think about that not now! She felt at once the cruel, inhuman injustice of it, and a terrible mocking hysteria that would turn the world upside down if she let it. If she once began to laugh it would turn into a scream and she had no idea where that would end.
    She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands and said: ‘But why , Charles? You're my husband, aren't you? And I need you!’
    ‘Not in the afternoon, woman, damn it! If I, as a man, can control my baser feelings, surely you can do the same! When I married you I thought you were at least guaranteed to act like a lady, but it seems I was mistaken. Or is this another of your advanced ideas about how the modern female should behave?’
    For a moment she felt a wild urge to spring forward and sink her nails into his neck, but she never did things like that. Anyway, he was far too strong; it would only lead to further humiliation. Deborah burst into tears instead. He was her husband, so of course he was right, but if only he knew! She was trying to save their marriage, not destroy it.
    But if what she feared was true then perhaps she had done that already.
    If she had it was his fault too. It would never have happened if he had been a real husband to her, the one she had wanted and thought she had married, nine long years ago. Or had she expected too much — things that no respectable woman should ever want? Tears of humiliation filled her eyes.
    ‘But if not in the afternoon then when, Charles? When? You haven't been a husband to me once since you came home, have you? Why is that? Perhaps you don't like me but I need you, Charles, sometimes I do! If only to have another child — I can't do that on my own, can I?’
    She hadn't meant to say that. But then she hadn't meant to do any of it. She turned and walked out of the room. He was right; she had lost control and now the results would lie like a sword between them for months, perhaps years.
    When her child was born he would know it could not possibly be his . . .
    When she had gone, Charles Cavendish stood for a moment, rigid, unmoving. He was not a man who liked emotion. He tried to damp it down, and, when he could, ignore it. It had got him into too much trouble in his life already. He walked slowly over to the window, and leant his head on the cool glass, staring out across the park at the trees of his estate.
    She is my wife for all that, he thought, the mother of my son. I should respect her, love her if I can. When we were first married . . .
    It seemed unimaginably long ago. He remembered how he had walked down the gloomy reverberating aisle of the church in Downpatrick with Deborah on his arm, out into the sudden glare of the sunlight where the honour guard of his regiment waited, with an arch of gleaming sabres raised. He had shivered then, and hesitated, struck by the irrational fear that one of those blades held by his brother officers would fall and strike him dead. But of course it had not. His friends knew nothing, they had only grinned and wished him luck. And as he had stood with that young, slender, happy fair-haired girl on his arm waiting to be photographed and the proud tearful smiles of their families around him, he had thought, with a sense of wonder and guilt and hope: I have done it now, and no one knows!
    I can start a new life. Have a wife and family like other men. No one raised any objection at the wedding. No one knows what I was.
    For a few months it had seemed like that. He was not given to dancing but when he had first courted Deborah it was that which had first attracted him. He had asked her to waltz and foxtrot with him and as they proceeded round the floor he had had the impression of a young woman who was lithe, agile, almost boyish in the way she moved. Quite different from the usual soft, scented, simpering girls he so loathed and avoided. With a girl like that he had thought it might almost be