Free The Tangling of the Web by Millie Gray Page B

because her Harry, being the perfect host that he was, had spent all his time making sure everybody was enjoying the party. He had been so busy he hadn’t even found time to dance with her.
    Setting himself down on a chair opposite Sally, Harry drawled, ‘It never occurred to me that you would still be up.’
    Rising to go over and sit on Harry’s knee, Sally chuckled, thinking back to the old days when he would slap his knees as a signal that he wished her to jump up on his lap. However, the sound died in her throat when Harry arose and brushed past her. ‘Sally,’ he said, ‘now we are alone I think we should get some things straight.’
    ‘Straight? What do you mean?’
    ‘Just … Look … We have to talk. You have to understand.’
    ‘Understand what?’
    ‘The way things are changing – or to be truthful – how they have, slowly over the years, changed between us.’
    Sally gave a nervous little twitter. ‘Of course things change. Nothing stays the same, but you and I, Harry, we’ve grown in strength and our love …’
    ‘That’s just it, Sally, our love for each other is past tense. I cannot remember the last time you said you loved me and we slept like two spoons.’
    This statement to Sally was so cruel that at first she decided not to answer it, but then she found herself quietly saying, ‘When the word “love” is spoken it means nothing. You see, when you love someone you don’t have to tell them every day – well, not if they are adult – they know you love them by all that you do for them. Like giving birth to their children, keeping their house, loving their mother as your own, nursing them when they’re sick. Oh yes, and love is patient, it does not fly into rages …’
    Harry had listened enough. ‘Look, Sally, your guff has no influence on me. What I want is for you to love me enough to let me go. Give me a divorce!’
    Sally started to whine like an injured puppy dog, but even her pitiful cries couldn’t stop him wounding her further.
    ‘Don’t you realise,’ he ruthlessly continued, ‘I wish to be free to marry someone who makes me feel like you used to. She is without a doubt the love of my life now.’
    Pressing her hands over her lips Sally tried to hush the terror-stricken screams that were rising in her throat. Although there was silence for only a minute between Harry and she, it seemed like an eternity. Eventually she managed to mumble, ‘Harry, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re having a mid-life crisis or something.’ Her right hand swept around the room to add emphasis to her plea. ‘Look, really look, at what we have built up here. This is not only our home: it is our children’s, your mother’s, my sister’s place of safety – a place where they know they are loved and wanted.’
    With a shake of his head and a wry contortion of his mouth, Harry snorted, ‘You still don’t see it, do you? This …’ he now indicated with a backward jerk of his thumb, ‘… is where all your lame ducks are welcomed. But me – for years I’ve realised that I’m just the one who goes out to two jobs to earn the money to keep them all in the comfort that they now think they are entitled to – but for no longer. Tomorrow I’m off into the arms of someone who thinks I’m the whole cheese and not just the smell.’
    Sally felt as if she was in a nightmare from which she must escape, so she picked up the loose skin of her left hand and pinched it so severely she howled, but still she didn’t awaken. ‘But Harry,’ she heard herself saying, ‘if you go I won’t be able to pay the mortgage and we, that is our Helen, Bobby and your mother, will all become homeless.’
    ‘And I hope you don’t think with the way you have indifferently treated me these last few years that that will change my mind. Listen again, but this time listen good. I am leaving you – I need a speedy divorce. So I am going to make you an offer that you would be foolish to refuse.’