~ Beauty For Ashes ~

by

Jane Ansty

From the bus, she had seen Luke walking happily with his arm around a tall, slim, dark-haired girl, a girl as young as she had been when she went out with him; and he had smiled and laughed and looked at that girl tenderly. And she had told herself she was happy for him, glad that he had found someone to replace her, then tried to ignore the intense jealousy which had swept through her for a moment, as she realized that this girl now possessed what she herself had rejected.

She arrived home a little after half-past nine. As she put her key in the lock, a hand on her arm made her turn suddenly, shrinking from the touch.

“It’s okay, Sam,” said a long-forgotten voice. “It’s me.”

She stared at him, the memory of Oxford surging back with a rush. “Luke, what on earth are you doing here?”

“I came to see that you were okay,” he said, simply. “Can we go inside?”

Sammy hesitated for a moment, then concluded that it was impossible to argue with him in the street in the plain view of passers-by, with the possibility that Michael might at any moment look out of the estate agent’s window and see them. She opened the door and hurried him inside. But she made no move to invite him further into the flat, and instead remained standing at bay with her back to the steps that led to the flat, as though guarding the gateway to her life.

“I saw you in Oxford last week,” he told her. “You were on a bus--I forget the name of the street we were in.”

“Yes,” she said. “At the traffic lights in the High. I saw you too.”

“You did?” He smiled at her, blue eyes sparkling just as she remembered them doing years before. She felt her own lips curve a little in response, and tightened them to keep them from encouraging him. He shouldn’t be smiling like that--for his own sake, for hers too.

The sparkle in his eyes dimmed. “I thought...” He hesitated. “I thought you looked unhappy. I wanted to be sure that everything was going well for you. If you need help...”

“I’m fine,” she snapped, all at once eager to be rid of him as soon as possible, terrified that Michael might for some reason decide to walk in on them. “Everything’s fine. Luke, you shouldn’t have come here. Michael would be so angry.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, surprised. “Why should he be angry? Doesn’t he trust you?”

For a moment she longed to admit it all to him, to tell him of the failure and the fear and the times of despair when to live with Michael for the whole of her life seemed totally impossible. Luke had found someone else to love now, she thought. He wouldn’t use her confession this time as an excuse to put pressure on her to leave, to go away with him, as once he might have done. But to enlist his sympathy would still be to embroil him again in her life. That would not be fair to him, or to the girl he now loved. And it might bring Michael’s unpredictable anger upon them all. She couldn’t risk that. But she didn’t know how to shut him out of her life gracefully. All she could do to defend herself was to let her fear turn to anger.

“Go away, Luke!” she said to him. “Don’t come here again. I’m perfectly all right. I have a lovely daughter, and a nice home, and... I’m not in the least unhappy,” she finished, amazed at how easy it was to lie when it seemed really important to do so. “Our lives don’t belong together any more--you know they don’t. They never did,” she added quickly, seeing the implications of that sentence begin to dawn on him. “I told you it would never have worked out. Now go away!”

She opened the door and almost pushed him out. But at the last moment he stopped in the doorway--just where the neighbours could see him, she realized bitterly.

“Okay,” he agreed slowly. “I’ll go. But promise me something in return. Promise me you’ll let me know if you ever need me. I’m not asking you for anything personally. Our love is over, as you say. But it matters to me that you’re happy. Promise me, Sammy.”

She hesitated. There were people passing in the street, and one or two looked curiously at Luke as he stood framed in the entrance. “Yes, all right, I promise. But I won’t ever need you. Go and live your own life and let me live mine.”

He turned and went out at that; and she shut the door behind him and fled up the stairs to the flat, weeping. She would never now escape from the memory of him, from the life she had rejected and which he now represented, in all its failed promise. She had chosen as she had chosen, she told herself firmly. I could have been just as unhappy with him, after all. And anyway, it’s no use wondering what might have been. It’s too late to change anything now. At least one of us is happy, this way. He doesn’t have to suffer for my mistake.

She had dried her tears and removed all sign of them from her face by the time Michael came in at lunchtime. He looked at her suspiciously when he opened the door of the flat, but said nothing until he had eaten his meal and was on the point of going out again.

“Luke was here this morning,” he said to her flatly, for all the world as though it was a natural and common occurrence.

She looked up at him fearfully. “Yes,” she said after a moment.

“I’m glad you didn’t try to deny it,” continued Michael inexorably. “I had it on the good authority of one of my clients in the town that a tall good-looking blond man with an American accent asked the way to my house this morning. Another one told me he was seen standing in the doorway here. You don’t have any other visitors who meet that description, I trust, Sammy?” The bitter edge to his voice cut like a whiplash.

“You know I don’t have any visitors at all,” she replied with as much dignity as she could muster. “I didn’t know Luke was coming, and I told him to go away and never come back.”

“Good,” he said smoothly. Then he added quietly, the level tone only adding to the menace of the words: “Because if he ever does come back, I’ll kill him. And you.”