He went into his office, and Tessa thought that if she told Jerry Fraine what had really happened, he would get the shock of his life. But Blaize Callagan wanted that kept confidential and that was the way it was going to be.
She idly wondered if Blaize might have been briefly piqued by her rejection of him as a lover. Decided against it. He had succeeded in getting what he wanted from the Japanese delegation. That was the important thing to him.
Although he had seemed to have some doubts about its importance on the second night. But by that time, Tessa thought cynically, he’d already achieved what he had set out to achieve. What was the phrase for it? Post coitus tristesse? After sex the sadness. She figured that all great men probably had the occasional doubts about what they were doing, but it didn’t stop their will to achieve.
Jerry poked his head around the door between their offices. “I wonder...” He gave a funny little laugh. “I wonder about a lot of things. As you so aptly remarked, Blaize Callagan keeps a lot to himself. Very difficult to know what he’s thinking. Or what he’s doing. Or what he’s done.”
“Yes,” Tessa agreed.
“Any comment?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.” He seemed to be pleased with himself. “So he did get up to tricks.”
“Jerry, you mustn’t make inferences like that.”
He immediately changed the subject. “Is the wedding on again?” he asked curiously.
“No.” She gave him a mocking smile. “It was a full-scale rift, Jerry. Not a tiff. We said our final goodbyes last night.”
“Oh!” His face softened into sympathy. “Sorry about that. I guess this has been a bad time for you.”
“I’ll survive,” she said airily. “There’s a lot more fish in the sea. That’s what people always say to you at a time like this. I’ve decided to go on a Pacific cruise and look them over. See if there’s one waiting with its mouth open to be caught.”
He relaxed into an approving grin. “Good for you, Tessa!”
Jerry was in excellent humour all day. He had figured out what really happened at the conference, and he made Tessa feel valued and appreciated with extra little courtesies. It helped.
That night she rang her sister. Sue was seven years older than Tessa, happily married with a husband who adored her and two beautiful children. Because of the age difference, Tessa had been deprived of any real sisterly companionship while growing up, but in recent years she’d forged a closer understanding with Sue.
That was why she had gone to her place on Sunday night to take refuge from Grant’s occupation of her apartment. At this stage, Sue represented a more sympathetic person to talk to than her mother would be. There was not so much of the generation gap that seemed totally unbridgeable with her mother.
“I’m calling the wedding off,” she told her sister bluntly.
“Thank God you’ve come to your senses at last!” came the approving reply. “You should have called it off with Grant years ago.”
“You didn’t like him?” Tessa asked weakly. She hadn’t known.
“He never appreciated you, Tessa. For heaven’s sake, having made the decision, don’t backslide now. Don’t let him talk or pressure you into going back to him.”
“You never said anything like this before.”
“You wouldn’t have listened. No point in saying anything. People never take advice about their love life. I can say it now because it’s not advice. I’m glad you’ve woken up in time. Never thought you would. Grant Durham wasn’t husband material, Tessa.”
“No. I guess he wasn’t. It still hurts a bit though.”
“Better to hurt now than to cost you later.”
“I suppose so. Will you back me up when I tell Mum? I’m not looking forward to that.”
“Mum wears rose-tinted spectacles. She is incapable of seeing harm in any handsome man. Lack of judgement. If she calls me, I’m all on your side.”
“Thanks, Sue.”
“Pleasure. And if you’re feeling miserable, pop over. You’re welcome any time.”
“Mum’s going to be upset about this. There’s no way of avoiding it.”
“Mum wasn’t going to marry the jerk. You were.”
Tessa recoiled from that description of Grant. It was wounding to her pride, if nothing else. “I didn’t know that you thought Grant was a jerk.”
“He was.”
Tessa sighed. “Oh, well, with my luck with Mum...”
“If she throws a tantrum, remember one thing.”
“What?”
“You would have copped the consequences. She wouldn’t.”
“Thanks, Sue.”
“My pleasure.”
They ended the call on this note of mutual understanding.
For the rest of the evening Tessa managed to keep Blaize Callagan out of her mind by reviewing her relationship with her mother. Which wasn’t good. Her mother criticised everything she did, and always had. Nothing was ever right or proper. Her mother was sixty years old—Tessa had been a late child—and the world had changed a lot since she was young. Tessa’s father had kept up with it, more or less, but her mother... there just didn’t seem to be a meeting place between them.
Tessa tried. She loved her mother. It wasn’t that she deliberately courted her disapproval. Basically she wanted what her mother had. A good marriage. The manner in which this purpose could be accomplished had altered so dramatically in the last forty years that the rules applicable then were no longer applicable now.
Her mother didn’t seem to understand. Women did have to work, did have to have a job to help pay off the mortgage. Men couldn’t survive financially without their women to help. And men had to respond by looking after their women differently. Her mother didn’t understand that, or a lot of other things, either, like sex. Disapproval of Tessa’s live-in relationship with Grant had soured many things between her mother and herself. At least, now, that was at an end.
Tessa wished it was as simple as it seemed to have been in her mother’s day, but the clock couldn’t be turned back. Fashions were different, hairstyles were different, music was different, the kind of social life people enjoyed now was different... all different. Women earned good enough wages to afford choices that hadn’t been available forty years ago. Tessa didn’t need a man to support her, not financially. But she wanted one to stand by her side and share her life, just as her mother had. That was one common ground between them.