A Fatal Attachment by Robert Barnard

hand.
    â€œMy long succession of failures, you mean.”
    â€œYou really don’t have to apologise for them,” said Lydia. “You are nothing to me . . . as I’m sure I am nothing to you.”
    The words seemed to be belied by the force with which she said them.
    â€œI wasn’t apologising,” said Jamie, still genial and apparently imperturbable. “I was just getting in first, and trying to emphasize how right you were to leave me. Or to persuade me to leave you. It would never have worked out. I realized in the first week that you’d married me because you couldn’t marry Robert.”
    A sharp expression of anger crossed Lydia’s face. This was not the first time this had been said to her. Wanting to marry Robert Loxton was certainly a sign of greater discrimination than actually marrying Jamie Loxton. Still, acknowledgement of the truth of the analysis seemed to convict her of a double degree of foolishness. She left a couple of seconds’ silence.
    â€œRobert has certainly made himself known, done something with his life,” she said cautiously.
    â€œOh, he has. When I tell people my name is Loxton they often ask if I’m related to him. When I say he’s my brother the polite ones suppress their surprise.”
    â€œHe’s in Greenland—no, Alaska—at the moment, isn’t he? I have an address somewhere to write to.”
    Jamie Loxton nodded.
    â€œAlaska. Him and Walter Denning on a two-man survival expedition of some kind. No doubt it will prove something or other about the limits of man’s endurance. Not something I’ve ever been very interested in, though I suppose my own survival proves something. We write friendly letters once a year at Christmas, if he’s around. I haven’t seen him for—oh, five years or more. . . . He should have married you, Lydia. You would have made a fine pair.”
    Lydia could find no reply. She was remembering her childhood, and how vividly her elder Loxton cousin had figured in it. He and Jamie were the children of her mother’s brother, and they lived over Malton way. In her early years—the war and its aftermath of austerity—they had seen each other perhaps once or twice a year, but what happy, golden times they had been. In the fifties they had come together much more often. Lydia’s father was head of a mass-market clothing firm in Halifax, and British business appeared to be booming. Both families had cars, both groups of parents enjoyed each other’s company. Now and then, in holiday times, Lydia and Thea, or Lydia alone, would take the train to Malton just for the joy of participating in the boys’ games and projects. Something —something funny or adventurous, always with a spice of surprise or danger to it, or something to test their physical prowess—was always going on.
    Perhaps she had understood then that the originator of these games was always Robert—that of the brothers one led and the other tagged along. Certainly by the time she had reached womanhood, had completed her degree and was out in the world, she had known that the one she wanted to marry was Robert. That had been the beginning of her going wrong emotionally. It had been some years before she realised that the projects and adventures of childhood had persisted into adulthood, and that Robert would be married to them and never to any woman. He was funny and affectionate and exciting when they met, but those meetings were always when he was just back from the Himalayas or shortly off to Antarctica or Siberia. So she had marriedJamie when he had asked her. And in the few months of their marriage she had learnt the bitterest of lessons. She had never again settled for second best. Second best, she now knew, was coming nowhere. It humiliated her to think that she had needed to learn that lesson, and how she had learnt it.
    â€œI don’t think it’s a good