David Ambrose by Mother Of God

Author:Mother Of God
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 43

SHE had always avoided being alone with Clive. She was afraid not of him but of herself. As long as she was with the two of them together she felt secure; she would not betray her feelings with Helen there. She could push thoughts of Clive aside, denying the fact that she was secretly in love with her best friend’s husband.

The first moment she had met him she had known. She had been introduced to Helen by an acquaintance in St Hugh’s whom she hardly ever saw any more. She and Helen had hit it off from the start in the way that the best friendships often do.

During the ensuing week when they had really got to know each other, Clive had been away at some conference. Tessa had barely given a thought to the absent husband until the Saturday afternoon that he returned. She had been in the house with Helen and the children when he walked through the door. Helen had introduced them, and she had felt herself go weak at the knees like a teenage girl. It was partly the resemblance to her father: the tumble of dark hair, the easy smile, something similar in the clear blue eyes. But his death had been a long time ago, and memory, she knew, tended to invent itself. It was just that, from the moment he walked into the room, Clive was everything she wanted in a man, cooked to perfection and served up on a plate — to her best friend. Which was how she intended things should stay.

She had been in love, of course, with other men since then. Each relationship had temporarily eclipsed her hidden obsession with Clive; and each one in turn had died and left her once again confronting it and hoping against hope that one day it would go away. Since Phil’s desertion it had crept up on her again, the old obsession, powerful as ever; which was why, as she walked down the corridor of the lab and stopped at the door behind which Clive awaited her, she took an extra breath before pushing it open and entering the room.

He looked up from the monitor where he was playing back the text of his conversation with Paul. He had on his face exactly the expression she had hoped to see there: something between astonishment and pure delight.

“Well?” she said briskly. “What d’you make of him?”

“I’d certainly give him an open scholarship, and I’d expect him to get a good first.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

Tessa had listened in to the whole conversation, but from a different room because she hadn’t wanted her presence to affect Clive’s interaction with the program.

“Of course he has a huge unfair advantage,” Clive said as he got to his feet.

“In what way?”

Clive shoved his hands into his pockets and ambled over to the window. It was dark outside and she could see their reflection in the glass — two people talking in a bare, impersonal room, their relationship oddly undefined.

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