Free Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam Page B

Clare in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the second book, she would relocate, in domestic service, to Edwardian Dublin. The third book proposed to take her, still in the service of her wealthy employers, to New York.
    Lillian had not known much about Robert O’Brien as an author but she had read the manuscript of the first story and thought it would be a very enjoyable project to illustrate. She had been told that he was thirty, eight years younger than she was. This had not been an issue either way. If anything, she was the more successful name in children’s fiction. She had not known anything about him at their first meeting because, beyond the obvious, she had not needed to.
    He came to her studio. He arrived on a motorcycle and when he took off his helmet, a dark mane of hair tumbled about his head and shoulders. He was half-Irish, with a Spanish mother, and the most exotically beautiful man she could ever remember having met.
    She had never been unfaithful to James before. And she had not lied, in telling him that she loved him. But he had been difficult over the past couple of years. She thought that he suffered from depression. It was not so bad that it debilitated him totally. It was not so bad that he was forced to seek medical help. But there was this air of melancholy about him most of the time. And she had come to think it contagious. It afflicted her and it afflicted the children too. She had not realised the extent of the damage it had done to their relationship, how far they had drifted apart because of it, until Robert rode with his dark good looks and humorous dynamism into a life he made her suddenly aware had become more solitary than it should have.
    In retrospect, she wished she had considered matters dispassionately at the outset. Had she thought it through, she would not have committed the betrayal. Had she calmly inventoried what she stood to gain from the affair against what it stood to cost her, she would not have gone to bed with Robert. Desire, mingled with a sort of loneliness, had combined to make the temptation strong. But it had not been irresistible and in surrendering to it she had let herself down.
    Had she thought about it, she would not have become involved with someone so volatile and needy. The problem was, though, that she had not started the affair thinking about how she would end it. She had started it intrigued, aroused and somewhat intoxicated by the flattering attentions of a beautiful man.
    Robert’s flaws only manifested themselves once you were intimate with him. They were partly instinctive, but partly also, she thought, a consequence of things having come so easily to him. He had actually qualified as a doctor. But he had never practised medicine. His first children’s story had been accepted for publication when he was still a student at the School of Medicine at Edinburgh. He had found a popular following straight away. His stories had inspired two successful television series and a feature film that had been a box-office sleeper hit in America.
    When a man achieved this sort of success, without much effort, before getting out of his twenties, Lillian discovered in Robert that it did two things. It made him feel he had attributes out of the ordinary. And it led him to believe that he deserved to be treated as someone special. All her instinct and experience with him told her that he was a man who would have difficulty taking no for an answer, because in his adult life rejection was something he had simply never experienced.
    Lillian stroked her sleeping son’s head on her lap and twisted his hair into silky ringlets between her fingers, wondering how Jack would react to exposure to his mother’s sexual betrayal of his father. He loved his dad. Both of the children did. James was a kind and attentive and generous father. He was generous in the way a child most valued in a parent: not with money to buy capricious gifts but with his time and his attention.