To Love, Honour & Betray

6

No one paid any attention to the fashionably dressed, elegant woman parking her car on the sunny residential London street. Why should they? The BMW might have been a more expensive, more up-market model than the others of its breed parked outside their owners’ smartly painted front gates, but it fitted neatly alongside the wide variety of chunky four-wheel-drive vehicles that had become the nineties’ version of the more traditional Volvo estate as the favourite vehicle for the school-and-shopping run.

The large double-fronted house close to which she had parked had recently been converted into a small hotel—the kind patronised by ladies of a certain age up from the country to spend a few days shopping and catching up with old friends. It might not have the éclat or the convenience of its Knightsbridge sisters but, ‘My dear, one gets … feels … so comfortable there—and safe….’ and its prices were, of course, so much cheaper.

But it wasn’t the hotel that was Claudia’s destination even though she spent several minutes staring at it.

The street, her surroundings, once so familiar to her, had changed dramatically from the days when she and Garth had rented a flat in one of the shabby and rather run-down terraced houses that had lined it. Since then, they had been smartened up and gentrified out of all recognition, their gleaming paintwork and shiny, clean, linen-draped windows confusing and bewildering her.

The flat she and Garth had rented had been at number twelve on the top floor—or rather in the attic—up a flight of rickety stairs covered by a piece of dust-filled, ancient, dark red patterned carpet—or at least they assumed it had once been dark red.

They had found it at the end of a long week of scouring the city for somewhere suitable to live that they could afford, and with Garth having only hours of his leave left before he was due to return to his regiment, they had pounced in relief on the opportunity to rent a place that was within their budget.

‘At least we’ll have our own bathroom and kitchen,’ Claudia had murmured when Garth shook his head over the grimy shabbiness of the small rooms, ‘and decorating it will give me something to do while you’re away.’

‘You’ll be working,’ Garth had reminded her before adding protectively, ‘and besides, I don’t like the idea of your climbing about on ladders when I’m not here.’

They had still been very much at the honeymoon stage of their marriage then, still very protective of their love and their privacy, and Claudia had been adoringly proud of the way Garth had refused both his and her own parents’ offer of financial assistance towards providing them with a better home.

‘No, we must start as we mean to go on,’ Garth had told her firmly while they were discussing the subject. All the protests she had been about to make melted beneath his kisses, just as her body did, when he added, whispering the words against her mouth, ‘I want to look after you myself, sweet. I want to take care of you.’

It might have been the seventies, she might have had her own newly burgeoning career, but Claudia had been brought up in a household by parents who adhered to the old-fashioned values of their own parents, and while she would have hated Garth to be domineering or bossy, to expect her to treat him as some kind of superior simply because he was a man, she made no bones about the fact that she enjoyed being pampered by him, being shown that he loved and cared about her; that he wanted to protect her and look after her. It was, after all, exactly the way her father treated her mother, and her parents had been happily married now for over twenty-five years.

They had moved into the flat one rainy weekend, good-humouredly assisted by some of Garth’s friends from the regiment, who had helped carry the sturdy pieces of furniture, given to Claudia and Garth by their parents, up to their new home.

‘But, darling, why waste your money buying furniture when Daddy and I have so much,’ her mother had protested when Claudia tried to object. ‘This table was your great-grandmother’s,’ she’d added softly after she and Claudia had gone up into the attic to sort through the furniture that was stored there.

And even though the solid furnishings looked slightly incongruous in the rather down-at-heel surroundings of their new home, it was comforting to have things around them that came from both their families, Claudia had told Garth lovingly.

Only their bed was new—at Garth’s masterful insistence—and Claudia had blushed slightly when they had gone to buy it and the salesman had insisted that they try it out.

‘We find that many couples these days are going for the larger king-sized bed,’ the salesman had told them, obviously scenting a better commission from the larger sale.

Garth had shaken his head and whispered teasingly to Claudia, ‘No way. I want you just as close to me as I can get you, in bed and out of it. I don’t want there to be any space, any distance, anything or anyone between us, Claudia,’ he had emphasised later when they had been alone in his car. He had parked down a quiet, overgrown country track, then pulled her into his arms and kissed her passionately to reinforce the intensity of his words.

Claudia had responded to him equally passionately, if a little shyly. She might not any longer be a virgin but she was still a little hesitant, a little unsure, even a little afraid of her own sexuality. She had been startled by her physical hunger for him and wondered how uninhibited it was permissible for a woman to be.

After Garth and his friends had finished carrying the furniture up the four flights of stairs to their attic home, Claudia had cooked them all a huge meal of spaghetti Bolognese cooked on the Baby Belling stove that was part of the fitments of the flat and that Claudia and her mother had spent hours cleaning with hundreds of packs of Brillo pads.

Afterwards, they had all gone to the local pub, where the short army haircuts of the men had marked them out quite clearly as what they were among the other young men there with floppy, often shoulder-length hair.

The air in the pub had been thick with cigarette smoke and the sweet, cloying smell of hash, and Claudia had been glad when it eventually came time to leave.

She and Garth had walked home, arms around one another, and in the shadows on the corner of the street, Garth had stopped and pulled her quickly into his arms, kissing her with fierce passion.

‘God, I want you, Claudia,’ he told her thickly. ‘Tonight, watching you …’ He stopped, shaking his head, not totally sure just how she would react if he told her about the almost savage spurt of lust and love he had felt earlier on in the evening, watching her as she leaned over the sink to reach something on its far side, the action drawing the fabric of her jeans tightly across the rounded peachiness of her behind.

The temptation to walk up behind her and reach around her to caress the warm weight of her breasts while he … Perhaps it was just as well that they hadn’t been alone and that the others had still been there at the time, he reflected wryly as he studied her face in the moonlight. She was so soft and gentle, so sweetly responsive, that he couldn’t quite bring himself to demand more of her, to show her the more forceful and sensual side of his sexuality. There was something about Claudia—a combination perhaps of her own innate gentleness and her upbringing—that set her apart from her more robust peers, which was one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her in the first place, Garth freely acknowledged.

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