‘No! Come on. Why d’you think I’m telling you this? I didn’t have to, did I, you daft mare. I wanted you to hear it from me. Nothing happened. Nothing ever could. You’re my wife.’ He planted a kiss on her neck. ‘I’ve never wanted anyone else. You know that.’

Jill leaned back against Terry’s hard body. She loved him so much. But Nula worried her. Nula had influence with Charlie. And Charlie frightened Jill, very much.

31

Charlie was learning that his promise to Nula about the adoption would be a difficult one to keep. They seemed to have been sitting in offices, answering questions about his business and their social life for bloody years, and he came out of every meeting in a thunderous mood. His business was his business. He didn’t like these government types, these official prats, taking out a microscope and looking in. It was dodgy, bearing in mind the business he was really in. But he’d promised Nula, so he forged on with it even though he was unhappy with the deal and increasingly thinking he should never have mentioned the possibility of adoption.

‘It’ll be worth it, honey,’ Nula always told him after the meetings, patting his arm, knowing how much he hated this sort of thing.

‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, and it would, he knew it would, if it got him a son to carry on his name. He tried not to resent poor Nula over her failure to bear another child, because it wasn’t the poor bitch’s fault, she couldn’t help it.

He knew Nula got depressed sometimes and he found that hard to deal with. He was strictly of the ‘pull yourself together’ school of thought. He had no patience with Nula when she was in one of her low moods, crying over nothing. He’d seen her scratching away in those damned notebooks that were supposed to be therapy for her and he’d hit the roof.

‘You ain’t mentioning my business in there are you?’ he’d yelled.

She’d sworn she wasn’t.

‘It’s just how I feel about things. Day-to-day things. That’s all,’ she’d told him.