An Absent Wife by Oster Camille

Author:Oster, Camille [Oster, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-11-26T04:00:00+00:00

They passed into Switzerland and then into France, their slow progress back to London moving relentlessly on. Lysander dined each meal with Adele, and before long they were invited to dine with other travelers as well. Sometimes he wished travel wasn’t such a social activity, but everyone sought amusement and diversion from the tedious hours with nothing to do but watch the landscape change—a diversion that finished when the sun went down.

Adele spoke competently of current topics, sometimes things she wouldn’t have learnt at his country house at Devon. He came to realize that some of the things she knew where from keeping company with that man. Jealousy stole into him at those points—along with the knowledge that she would likely still be with him if he hadn’t been unfortunate enough to succumb to a tropical disease.

She’d stated that she’d been happy with that man, and she never had been with him. It wasn’t surprising; he’d never so much as tried to nurture their marriage, having been too distracted with how it came about and the things he’d lost because of it. Perhaps he had made a mistake all those years, ignoring her and refusing to develop any relationship between them. This was a new thought; he’d regretted the misery that his actions in this marriage had caused her, but he’d never considered the loss to himself.

As he sat watching Adele talking animatedly with a couple from Rochester, he wondered how this marriage could have turned out differently. He knew it was his fault; he saw that now. He’d had no intentions of changing the nature of their relationship at the time she’d chosen to abandon him; he would have continued in exactly the same fashion. He’d even been angry at her death for changing the continuity of his current life, which waited for him back in London—Harry, Evie and Isobel, along with his clubs and his schedule—the life of an unencumbered bachelor, without the tedious designs of matrons on his bachelor status. But he wasn’t a bachelor and he never had been. And now his life was confusing. He was dragging her back and there would be unpleasantness whatever he chose to do. He didn’t want to be cruel to her; he had fully admitted that he had been at some points, where his anger had focused on her as the cause for all his misfortunes—while she’d never been the cause for their marriage. She’d had even less choice than him. Her resignation and acceptance of the marriage used to grate on him and he blamed her for her lack of objection to any of it—just accepting it in her steadfast and unassuming way. But then her subsequent actions had proven that she hadn’t accepted it, but was opposed to his consistent rejection of their marriage, hers had expressed itself explosively with abandonment of station, marriage and propriety, all at once.

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