The Bitter Core

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1954, and available now for the first time in eBook. When beautiful Venetia Sellingham got married for the second time they all said it wouldn?t work. For young huntsman Mike Petheric, though handsome and virile, was twelve years her junior. But Venetia didn?t care and neither did Maybelle, her fifteen-year-old daughter. Not at first, anyway. But as the novelty of marriage wore off, so did the glamour of youth. And then there were some other sides to Mike?s character that didn?t appear quite so attractive?

Release date: December 5, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 176

Sample

VENETIA SELLINGHAM woke up on her forty-fifth birthday and lay still for a moment without moving. She felt ill.

There was nothing radically wrong with her. She was particularly healthy for a woman of her age, and as those who liked her continually said, Venetia is a marvel—she looks about thirty. Nobody would dream that she is a widow and the mother of a great girl of fifteen.

But this morning Venetia faced the fact that she was, after all, forty-five; that she was Maybelle’s mother; that Maybelle was just about to enter for School Certificate. Added to which, Venetia did not feel as young as she looked.

She had had too many of Mike’s strong cocktails. Darling Mike would mix them with a kick that hit one suddenly. All very subtle to start with and one went on sipping and letting him pour one out another. What a party it had been!

“To celebrate your thirty-fifth birthday, my sweet,” he had said, significantly stressing the ‘thirty’.

Venetia pressed her fingertips against hot eyelids. Mike’s party had taken place in the flat he shared with his friend and business partner, Tony Winters. Venetia’s best friend, Barbara Keen, had arrived, as usual, later than anybody else, looking thin, beautiful and incredibly well dressed; with that slightly hungry look characteristic of Barbara.

As Mike had once said to Venetia:

“Barbara always looks as though she is about to devour people. She sticks her face right into yours when she talks to you and plucks at your arm with those long coloured talons. You feel that she is after something—if not you. She is the most predatory female I have ever known; not like you, Venetia darling—you’re so subtle and reserved, so calm and aloof. Drop a pebble into your personality and you’ll watch the shining ripple widen. Drop one into Barbara’s and it will sink to the murky depths like a plummet and you’ll never see it again.”

That was true in a way. Barbara was restless and exhausting; and far too exacting. She had already had two husbands and several lovers. She was only a year older than Venetia. But she had her good points and there was a side to her nature before which Venetia bowed; the courageous industrious side. One had to admire Barbara. She had had real tragedy in her life and was bitterly frustrated, but she presented to the world the spectacle of a gay, self-satisfied creature who could boast that she had built up one of the best businesses in the cosmetic trade. Using the last syllable of her name, ‘Bara’, she had launched a really attractive campaign to attract the attention of women who needed ‘slimming’ and reasonably priced cosmetics. BARA products were now known in America as well as in Great Britain. The Bara Salon in Bond Street had been succeeded by branches all over the provinces.

Barbara had said to Venetia last night:

“Look, Venetia, you’re supposed to be an intelligent woman. Have you gone out of your mind?”

Venetia answered:

“No. Must one be deranged before one decides to marry for the second time?”

Barbara’s curt reply, “I’ll come along and talk to you when I’ve got a moment,” was enough to damp Venetia’s enthusiasm a little but no more. She was far too happy. It had been hard making up her mind. Now, having made it up, she was relieved and delighted. Last night she and Michael had announced their engagement. Everybody in the crowded flat had surged around to toast them in champagne amid cries of “Congratulations—how marvellous, Venetia, darling. How splendid, Mike. Oh, what a thrill!” and so on.

Venetia had felt quite light-headed in her pride and satisfaction as she felt Mike’s hand gripping hers, and compared him with the rest of the men in the party. He was perfectly wonderful to look at; not very tall but slim-hipped and broad-shouldered—racily built and he glowed with health. He looked what he was—a man who lived a great deal out of doors. Mad about horses, he rode superbly. The flat was full of his trophies. What hadn’t Mike won at point-to-points, in jumping contests, at horse shows? He was a member of the Southdown, great friends with all the hunting chaps. He spent his week-ends at his old home—a fine old Queen Anne manor house near Lewes. The estate consisted of twenty-five acres and a farm, but unfortunately Mike had no money with which to keep the place up. It was in bad repair. The stables were letting in water. Mike had only one horse. He needed two. Lack of money had been the trouble ever since before the war when his mother had died. His father was now hopelessly crippled with arthritis. Venetia was not unaware that people might imagine that Mike was marrying her for the money that poor Geoffrey had left her. Money that was not even entailed because there had been no need for Geoffrey to provide for his little daughter. Maybelle would come into her grandfather’s fortune. Lady Sellingham (she had been a Miss Occulton) had her own money which had come to her from old Thomas Occulton. He had founded an iron and steel works that paid nearly fifty per cent to its shareholders today. And old Lady Sellingham held two-thirds of the firm’s shares. All that would one day belong to Maybelle; a portion after her twenty-first birthday and the rest when her grandmother died.

Supposing, Venetia reflected, Mike did need her money. Why not? Why not be sensible and accept the fact that in his impecunious state he needed money? On his own admission, he had had many love affairs. But he ‘couldn’t afford to marry’. She, Venetia, could help provide the things that he wanted. She would enjoy doing it and, besides, Maybelle would like having a stepfather who rode so well. She, too, adored horses.

Venetia and Mike had fallen in love with each other at the Hunt Ball, last Christmas. She had gone down to it with Geoffrey’s cousin, Dick. Venetia had never been to a Hunt Ball before. She used to avoid such entertainment. She did not really like the hunting crowd. She had never cared for strenuous exercise. She came from a family of musicians who lived quietly, were immersed in their art. She had married the man of her heart soon after her twenty-third birthday. Geoffrey had been at that time the junior partner in a firm of publishers—the kind that published educational works and technical manuals. He was a sweet, rather dreamy type of man who had come through the Second World War with the loss of his left arm—blown off in the woods of Caen. Fortunately for him he had money of his own and no need to struggle. Venetia had loved him as devotedly and deeply as he loved her. Theirs had been a perfect marriage and some years later a daughter had been born after Venetia had wondered if the joys of parenthood were to be denied her. She had been blessed not only with the ideal husband but a delightful mother-in-law. A most intelligent and charming woman. The birth of little Maybelle, so called after Geoffrey’s mother, completed their happiness.

But it had been too perfect a union, Venetia had mused in the bitterness of her sorrow—nothing so splendid could last, and it had ended suddenly when Maybelle was nine. One of those ghastly tragedies which seemed to be without reason or meaning.

It had been during Maybelle’s first term at boarding-school, and the first time that Venetia and Geoffrey had felt that they could take a long holiday alone without their precious child. They visited Italy. Geoffrey particularly wanted to see Rome.

Within a week of their arrival, he had been struck down with a fatal germ; to this day nobody quite knew what it was. And to this day Venetia tried not to remember too vividly the awfulness of the week that had followed. That evening when Geoffrey had been seized with stomach cramp and, taken to his bed. A hastily summoned doctor failed to diagnose and, after a frantic telephone call through to Geoffrey’s mother, Venetia had had her husband flown back to London on a stretcher, and taken straight to a clinic. He had died there at the end of the week. It had been a horrifying experience for Venetia. She had, until then, led a protected and blessed life with her husband.

She was forced to watch Geoffrey change with terrible rapidity from a good-looking, well-covered man into a gaunt spectre with cadaverous eyes and suffering mouth. In appalling pain he never complained; only, clung to her hand and begged her to stay near him.

His heart had given out before the doctors really had time to complete all the pathological investigations: the laboratory analysis; the tests and injections. He had an unsuspected coronary weakness. So he had died and left her and Maybelle alone. And Venetia had wondered how there could be a God so brutal—so greedy of human life that He must take a man of thirty-seven who had everything that he seemed to want on earth. It had struck a double blow at his mother, too. Lady Sellingham had only recently lost her husband. But the older woman had shown great courage, that patience which only seems to come with age and experience. She, although mourning an idolized son, had helped Venetia to live through those first bitter months of loss and loneliness.

“You have your little daughter—she is so like Geoff. She must be your comfort,” Lady Sellingham would say when Venetia continued to weep—inconsolable.

Maybelle was an enchanting child with Geoffrey’s grey dreamy eyes and her mother’s ash-blonde hair. For a while mother and daughter stayed in the lovely cottage facing Richmond Park to which Geoffrey’s mother had retired after his father died and their old home had been sold up. It was a sunny, peaceful little house, full of the antiques and books that Geoffrey had loved. Not for a year did Venetia re-open her own home which she and Geoffrey used to share. It was a, small but elegant house in a cul-de-sac close to Kensington Gardens. Geoffrey was particularly fond of Kensington Gardens and some of the happiest moments Venetia could remember were when Maybelle was small, and they used to take her to the Round Pond to sail her boats, or feed the ducks on the Serpentine. One day, when he retired, Geoffrey used to tell Venetia, they would buy a house in the depths of the country and segregate themselves from the world. But during the early years of their marriage they both loved the little white house with the yellow doors and windows, and the glimpse of the Albert Hall. Geoffrey had decided on all the decorations and helped Venetia choose the furniture. After he died she could not bear to break up that home. Once having got over the initial shock, it comforted her to stay amongst his things; and to imagine that she could see him sometimes, strolling across the room—the dear familiar figure with the one empty sleeve pinned across the breast and the one good hand ever outstretched to her or to their child.

The memory of that love had sustained Venetia for the first two or three years after his death. She had finally grown accustomed to being without him and able to do what she thought the right thing—which was to continue sending Maybelle to boarding-school. Not for selfish reasons, so that she, the mother, would be free to have a good time, but because she was convinced that it was bad for an only child always to be at home with her mother. Maybelle inherited so much of Geoffrey’s erudition. She liked school and her studies and the holidays were fun when mother and daughter returned, refreshed, to each other.

Many men had wanted to marry Geoffrey Sellingham’s widow. A beautiful woman of forty with money behind her is a desirable prize. Apart from the money Venetia was truly lovely, her fair hair only touched with grey, her tall body still firm and slim. The pure oval of her face, the fine dark brown eyes set at a slightly slanting angle fascinated people. She dressed well; she was a good hostess; a polished conversationalist. Without having any great technique she played the piano and sang charmingly. Her friends said that Venetia was always an asset at any party. And she gave good parties of her own.

Venetia continued to lie in bed, thinking, remembering, on this her birthday morning. And for the first time in her life it was reluctantly that she considered the fact that this marked the end of her forty-fourth year.

Before meeting Mike she had never minded about the passing of time. Like any Woman who has been beautiful, she was anxious to retain the illusion of youth and beauty as long as she could, but the idea of ageing did not worry her, even when the crow’s feet made a little net-work around her eyes; when tummy muscles sagged and the waist-line thickened a little and, searching the mirror, it became obvious that she could no longer be called young. Now she might cry with the French: ‘Forty is the old age of youth, but fifty is the youth of old age.’

Fifty! That made even Venetia squirm a little this morning as she considered that in another five years she would have reached her half century. And Mike would still be under forty. At forty a man was in his prime.

She thought of Mike as she had first seen him in his hunting ‘pink’, waltzing superbly with the girl with whom he had at the time been involved.

“You know how it is,” he had explained at a later date to Venetia. “One has to pay some woman compliments and kiss her and run around with the orchids. I, in particular, keep a love-affair going in self-defence; it checks the pursuit of the females with whom one doesn’t want to get involved!”

Typical of Mike and his colossal egotism. He had looked devastating in that pink coat; the brown of his neck very brown against the white stock, and the blue of his eyes very blue in his tanned face; rather narrow laughing eyes. Mike did a lot of laughing. His most engaging quality was his ‘sense of fun’. He could be sweet and friendly, too, and that boyish side to Mike went to Venetia’s heart. He was a man with no family ties, except a bed-ridden father who, like Mike, had, at one time, been on the Stock Exchange. Mike had not, so far as Venetia could see, made a great success as a stockbroker. This applied also to his partner, Tony Winter, whose flat he shared. Both the young men seemed to find it hard to make a decent living. All the same, Mike managed to hunt and to get down to the South of France in the summer.

From the moment that he had first taken Venetia in his arms, she had surrendered to his long kiss with a frank passion that seemed to enchant him.

“You are so very stimulating. Venetia,” he had told her. “You don’t pretend. Not a trace of the coquette about you, my sweet. You want me as much as I want you—don’t you?”

Her answer had been ‘Yes’.

This morning she recalled vividly all that had happened that evening.

MIKE had come round to her house for drinks before taking her out to a show. They had then known each other less than a month, during which she had seen quite a lot of him. She knew that he admired her. So far he had not made love to her. But she had been subtly conscious of his rising passion.

At first she had been afraid; the difference in their ages frightened her.

Venetia had had to do a lot of thinking about it all. But all the thoughts had scurried like autumn leaves before a strong wind, scattering in all directions once she discovered that she was in love with him.

That fateful evening she had put on a new grey ballet-length skirt and pale grey velvet blouse—off-the-shoulders—just showing the cleft between small breasts of which she was justifiably proud. They were still as firm as a girl’s. The only colour in her appearance was in the pink orchids which Mike had sent her and which she wore pinned to her belt.

Michael had given her one swift glance and then without his usual smile or jest, said in a hushed voice:

“By God, you are a beautiful woman, Venetia—you knock the girls absolutely for six!”

She had bowed her head in dignified acceptance of his compliment and with that lack of archness that he so admired.

“But the girls still have that something which I haven’t got,” she said, with a smile.

“Name it.”

“Youth,” she said. Without envy, she had said it as an indisputable fact.

But she was glad that he found her beautiful. In BARA’s Bond Street salon that morning they had induced her to put more blue than usual in the rinse they used for her hair. It certainly made it look attractive: the colour of woodsmoke with a pale gilt sheen. It was long straight hair. She had never worn it any other way but this—parted in the centre and drawn into a coil at the nape of her neck.

“What time have we got to be at the show?” she had begun to ask Mike, dropping her blue mink stole over a chair and picking up a cigarette.

It was then that Mike took two steps across the room, caught her wrists and looking more serious than she had ever seen him said:

“I’m crazy about you, Venetia—I can’t go on …”

For an instant she stood still. She looked up at him amazed.

“Mike—what is it?”

“You must know that I am terribly in love with you,” he said.

The way her heart had jerked then and her knees begun to tremble had warned that she was not at all indifferent to his passion—on the contrary. But for a moment she had tried to keep her head.

“Hadn’t you better have a drink, my dear?” she asked.

After that she was not given any further opportunity to think or analyse her emotions. She was in his arms and he was kissing her with a hungry passion to which she responded, both arms around his neck. They had continued to kiss, deeply, insatiably. Mike, as a lover, was not to be dealt with lightly. His were the sort of kisses Venetia had never before experienced. Geoffrey had not been that kind of lover; he had been more gentle; ever careful of her. Even during his most passionate moments he had never seemed entirely to lose his head. He remained sensible of her feelings—over-careful perhaps not to jar her susceptibilities. She had thought him wonderful and been satisfied by his embrace. His chivalry and idealism had seemed to her correct and admirable. Only now in Michael’s embrace she knew what a woman could be made to feel.

Her life had been empty of all passion for five long years and she was quite appalled to discover how much she needed this sort of thing. She found herself more primitive than she had realized, and if there was a fierce and demanding quality in Michael Pethick’s love-making, she enjoyed it; and returned it. It was as though all her pent-up feelings were released in his arms. There was a lifting of a burden from her spirit, too. The burden of widowhood and of the solitary confinement in which she had placed her physical self. Besides, it was enormously flattering to have a lover like this when one was nearing forty-five, this young man—twelve years younger—vowed that he must possess her or die. Venetia had had to insist that he should let her go—regained her own lost dignity, put some ice in the cocktail-shaker and mixed a drin. . .