by Jill Mansell
“On Cecilia’s twenty-first birthday her mother died of cancer,” said Mac slowly, deliberately heightening the contrast between his own even tones and Loulou’s hysterical shrieks. Torn between his desperate love for her and the heavy weight of obligation he felt toward Cecilia, he struggled to find the right words.
“She’s so paranoid about birthdays—believing each year that something awful will happen—that she plans them weeks and weeks ahead. I promised her that this year we’d take a trip on the Orient Express. Lou, I don’t want to do this any more than you want me to, but I simply can’t break that promise. Cecilia isn’t strong like you, and she couldn’t cope with it if I dropped her now—can’t you understand that?”
“Oh, poor, fragile Cecilia,” ridiculed Loulou, pushing open the window and taking several deep breaths. “For a start, she’s a top model—the top model of the moment—and you don’t get to a position like that without fighting for it. She’d give an Olympic boxer a run for their money, that’s for sure. But what really gets me,” she continued, reaching for her leather dress and black jacket and rapidly climbing into them, “is the fact that you’re backing out again, using her as an excuse to get away. I don’t believe you, Mac. It’s just so much more bullshit. Why the hell can’t you be honest, be like all the other men and simply admit that you fancied a quickie with your ex?”
Mac sank back against the pillows, defeated. Loulou was moving fast now, stuffing her garter belt and stockings into her handbag and sliding into her spiky high heels.
“Who knows,” she continued, coming to stand at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips and an expression of deep disdain masking the grief and pain, “I may have gone to bed with you anyway, just for the hell of it, so there wasn’t even any need to swear all that touching, undying devotion.” Then she stepped back again. “Now fuck off out of my life and go back to your poor, gentle wimp of a girlfriend. Wish her a happy birthday trip from me…and I hope you both drown in Venice.”
Then, leaving him no time to react, she picked up his clothes from the chair and hurled them out through the open window. His shoes followed one at a time, distant splashing sounds three floors down indicating that they had traveled farther, landing in the hotel garden’s carefully tended lily pond.
“Like that,” pronounced Loulou with a mixture of fear and satisfaction as she darted toward the door. “I hope you fall into the water and bloody well sink!”
Chapter Fifty-Two
“If you weren’t my father,” chided Natalie, watching from the depths of the squashy leather settee as Sebastian made rapid notes in a file and replaced his calculator in the appropriate compartment of his briefcase, “I’d think you were a stuffy old man.”
He glanced across at her, genuinely puzzled. “I’m an efficient, properly organized young man. The fact that I have a grown-up daughter is merely an accident of nature; it doesn’t mean I’m old.”
“OK.” Natalie shrugged, conceding the point. “But it’s a Sunday, and all you’ve done since you got up is drink black coffee and work. Don’t you ever take any time off and have fun?”
Sebastian recapped his fountain pen and sat back in his chair. “I enjoy working. That’s why your mother and I have always got on so well together; she has her career and I have mine, and we aren’t afraid of either hard work or the success that results from that. We’ve always understood each other’s priorities.”
“Well, I’m bored,” Natalie countered, her mouth turning sulkily downward. “Working with pages of figures isn’t my idea of a great time. And Roz—Mum—doesn’t do half as much work as you do. I bet she only pretends to be like you so you’ll be impressed.”
“Roz doesn’t need to try to impress me,” said Sebastian slowly, stalling for time. Really, this girl had an alarming knack of making rash statements that were uncomfortably incisive. To change the subject, he said, “And I do have ‘fun’ as you call it, but it’s not exactly the kind of fun one can have when one’s daughter comes to stay.”
“Sex!” said Natalie with such disgust that he almost smiled. “You don’t need those women. What’s wrong with my mother?”
“I’m in Switzerland and she’s in London. It tends to hamper one’s spontaneity, you know.”
Natalie changed tack, shifting onto her side and giving him her most beguiling smile. It was too much like Roz’s not to have an effect, and Sebastian began to suspect that he was being cunningly manipulated against his will.
“That gives you more chance to be spontaneous,” she cajoled, observing the look of discomfort on her father’s face. “It’s only eleven o’clock; we could be in London by midafternoon. And that really would be an ultra-cool, ultra-spontaneous thing to do.”
“Out of the question,” he said firmly, not realizing that his fountain pen, not properly capped, was leaking black ink through his best Turnbull & Asser shirt pocket. “Nothing’s organized.”
“Don’t be so stuffy and boring!” cried Natalie, leaping to her feet. “We drive to the airport, we catch a plane, we take a taxi to Camilla’s house. There, I’ve organized you.”
“But…” began Sebastian hopelessly, knowing that he’d been beaten and wondering why it was so easy to be assertive at work and so impossible now.
“Stop it, Dad,” said Natalie swiftly. “Go get your passport and stop arguing. And look on the bright side; this is going to be the most wonderful, spontaneous surprise ever for Mum.”
“She doesn’t like surprises,” grumbled Sebastian, reaching uneasily for his keys and pushing back his chair. “She’s like me; she prefers everything to be planned.”
Natalie grinned, hugged him, and gave him a kiss.
“But sometimes things happen that aren’t planned, and they turn out OK,” she said gleefully. “Like me.”
* * *
As Camilla sat outside, shielding her eyes from the bright sun and watching Marty and Toby cavorting around the garden, she reflected that it was difficult to be happy when everyone else seemed hell-bent on plunging themselves into misery. Loulou, slippery with oil, was stretched out on a yellow sun lounger, sulking like mad and intermittently listing aloud all Mac’s bad points. Charlotte, who was, according to her, the only girl in the whole of London missing the Madonna concert at Wembley, was out-sulking even Loulou. Rocky, having exhausted himself chasing Marty around the garden, was now suffering from heatstroke and lying gloomily in the shade of the weeping cherry tree.
And Roz, tense and irritable because there had still been no word from Natalie, was upstairs packing to leave for Gloucestershire. At lunchtime, having finally weakened, she had rung Sebastian’s number in Zurich and there had been no reply. Snappy, rejecting Camilla’s reassurances, she was desperately on edge.
No one, it had rapidly become apparent, was the least bit interested in hearing about Camilla’s new man. Even Lili, her cloudy black corkscrew curls tied up in a daffodil-yellow bow, had looked unimpressed when Camilla had pulled her onto her lap for a cuddle.
“Wanna play with Rocky,” she protested, pouting and scrambling back down. Moments later, after tugging Rocky’s ears so strenuously that he whined and shot inside the house, Lili burst into noisy floods of tears that only added to the general mood of doom and gloom. Marty ran over, visibly upset, and tried to kiss Lili better, but outraged by the interruption, she screamed even more loudly and pushed him away with agitated, outstretched hands. Confused and hurt by the rejection, Marty, too, started to cry.
“Jesus, what a racket,” complained a good-natured, wonderfully familiar voice.
Camilla almost leaped out of her seat, her heart thumping like a tom-tom. “Piers! What on earth are you doing here?” she said breathlessly, aware that Roz had appeared at the open french windows, an expression of deep interest in her dark eyes.
“Couldn’t wait until Wednesday, I’m afraid.” He shrugged and laughed at her unconcealed amazement, th
en solemnly handed her a canister of Ralgex pain-relieving cream. “For your poor old muscles, sweetheart. It smells terrible but it’ll stop them aching.”
Blushing furiously and realizing that he had deliberately engineered the situation so that she would do just that, she pushed the can underneath her chair and stood up to introduce him to everyone.
“Roz let me in just now when I rang the bell,” he said, extending his hand and taking in at a glance Roz’s slender, tanned figure. “Of course I recognize you from your TV show. And you must be Loulou,” he went on, taking over with the ease of a politician. “If it hadn’t been for you doing your disappearing act last night, I might not have had the opportunity of meeting Camilla, so thank you. How did it work out with your ex-husband, by the way?”
“The absolute pits,” said Loulou, so cheerfully that Camilla stared openmouthed at her. “I threw all his clothes out of a hotel window.”
Piers grinned. “Good for you; he must have deserved it. Now.” He turned to the children. “You must be Toby…and you’re Marty…and this beautiful young lady has to be Charlotte.” Entranced, they each shook hands with him before he turned to Lili, sitting sucking her thumb on the grass. “And this gorgeous girl is Lili, am I right?”
He remembers every name, thought Camilla with a surge of amazed gratitude as Lili, tears forgotten, showed her pearly teeth in a smile. Within seconds, Piers’s arrival had transformed the atmosphere, a knack that Matt had possessed but at which Piers was clearly a true master. Glancing sideways, she saw Roz joking with Charlotte. Marty was jumping up onto her abandoned chair with his favorite teddy, and Loulou was gathering Lili into her arms so that Piers could admire her more closely.
His smile, when he finally turned to look at Camilla once more, almost stopped her heart.
“You’re even more beautiful now than you were this morning,” he said, his voice low and caressing. “I had to see you again. Do you mind terribly?”
“I was just surprised,” she murmured, still lost in admiration at the way he had recalled everyone’s name. He was one of those oh-so-rare men who genuinely listened to people instead of waiting for them to stop talking so that he could start.
And he had driven up to London to see her. What on earth was she going to do with him for an entire Sunday afternoon?
“We’ll go out,” he said, as if reading her hopelessly untogether thoughts.
“But the children…”
Piers brushed a ladybug from the sleeve of his yellow-and-white-striped shirt and pulled a pair of dark glasses from his pocket.
“They come too, of course,” he said simply, as if the idea that they should be left behind hadn’t even occurred to him. “I love kids.” Then he winked. “Especially casseroled.”
* * *
Driven to drink, thought Roz gloomily, gazing at the half-empty bottle of wine on the table beside her. The cottage seemed dark and oppressive and was almost eerily silent, but outside swarms of midges danced in the last of the evening sunlight, and she hadn’t the patience right now to tolerate them.
Seeing Camilla with Piers had depressed her still further; it seemed that fate was taking a fairy-tale hand and presenting the good girl with a charming prince while at the same time making sure that Roz, the evil witch, got all the punishment she deserved.
And Piers was charming, there was no doubt about that, she thought with a resurgence of the jealousy that had gnawed at her throughout her lonely trip home. Once, she wouldn’t have thought twice about making a play for him. Now, however, she wondered whether he would even be interested. The look he had given her had been appraising, pleasant, polite…and decidedly uninterested.
The interest, thought Roz with guilty envy, had been reserved entirely for Camilla.
And as she took another slug of the not-quite-chilled white Burgundy, she reflected that only yesterday Piers and Camilla had undoubtedly spent a night of fevered, exquisite passion in her very own bed.
I mustn’t be jealous, she told herself hopelessly. But it was hard not to be when her own life was so barren, and there had still been no word from either Natalie or Sebastian. In her present mood, she could almost believe that never hearing from them or seeing either of them again would be the best thing that could happen. Loving people only caused pain. Losing them was far, far worse.
* * *
“I still don’t know why I’m doing this,” complained Sebastian as he indicated left to turn off the motorway. Unfamiliar with the hired car he had picked up at Heathrow, the windshield washers burst into life instead.
Natalie giggled. “Because you try too hard to be perfect. You think Roz is perfect. And so you both lead single, almost-perfect lives and don’t even realize that you’re lonely. If you and Mum think so much of each other, how can you bear to see her only once or twice a year? It’s like eating one chocolate and throwing the rest of the box away.” Enjoying herself, and reveling in the role of relationship adviser, Natalie grew expansive. “You think self-denial is good for the soul, and maybe some of the time it is, but human relationships aren’t like that. When two people love each other, they make compromises and accept each other’s imperfections, and that makes them happy.”
Sebastian held up his hand. “All right, all right. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being preached at by a girl almost young enough to be my daughter. Now look, are you quite sure Roz is even going to be at the cottage when we finally get there?”
“Of course,” said Natalie complacently. “When I phoned Loulou, she told me that Mum had left London at around three. Just trust me, Dad…and stop worrying!”
“And if there’s one thing I never do,” replied Sebastian ruefully, “it’s place my trust in a girl almost young enough to be my daughter.”
She laughed. “Make an exception, Dad. Have a little faith. Everything’s going to be all right.”
* * *
Dusk was falling when Roz heard the car pull up outside the cottage, but she was too depressed to go to the window and see who it was. Having neglected to switch on any lights, she hoped vaguely that the visitor might think the house was empty. If she ignored the doorbell, they would disappear again and leave her in peace.
But the doorbell did not ring. Instead, Roz heard a key turning slowly in the lock and experienced such a rush of relief that she felt momentarily light-headed. Thank God, she thought with fervent gratitude, Natalie had come back. At least she hadn’t lost her.
The sight of Sebastian standing silently in the doorway of the dimly lit sitting room was so totally unexpected that, for a second, she truly wondered if she was dreaming, that after having thought so hard and so often about him since Natalie’s flight to Zurich, her mind had somehow conjured up this apparition.
But Roz was a practical person, and she didn’t allow her mind to play tricks on her. Besides, apparitions didn’t wear Gucci loafers.
Nor, particularly when the apparition concerned was Sebastian, did they sport wayward black ink stains on their pristine white shirt.
“So she did find you,” said Roz, managing to sound almost conversational despite the frantic clamor of her heart. Now, now at last, she would know how Sebastian had reacted to the news that she had been too afraid to tell him for over eighteen years.
“Naturally,” he replied, with a faint, dry smile. “It was what she set out to do. Can you imagine anything or anyone defeating that girl?”
“She’s certainly strong-willed,” admitted Roz, thinking how crazy it was that she and Sebastian should be standing here like this discussing their daughter with such stilted formality. It was like a parent-teacher meeting at school, for God’s sake.
Sebastian, however, seemed not to notice the incongruity, but then that was him all over.
“She nags me,” he was saying now, looking perplexed. “Can you believe that? Me, nagged by a scruffy eighteen-year-old who doesn’t e
ven brush her hair. She bullied me into flying over here today. I’m supposed to be at a board meeting first thing tomorrow morning, and she simply doesn’t care about that.”
“And you have ink on your shirt,” murmured Roz, almost in wonderment. The Sebastian she had known for so long didn’t allow himself to be bullied by anyone, and his clothes were always entirely immaculate. Although, in a curious way, the ink stain reassured her more than anything else could have done, and because of it, she felt able to make her move.
“So why are you here, Sebastian?” she ventured boldly, her dark eyes meeting his with a challenging stare, her bare toes tensing against the thick pile of the Persian rug beneath her feet.
He gestured aimlessly, a most un-Sebastian-like feature. “I don’t honestly know. Natalie insisted, I suppose.”
“Where is she now?”
“In the car.” He half smiled again. “Probably with a pair of binoculars trained on this window.”
Since a romantic Hollywood embrace didn’t appear to be on the cards, Roz sank back down into her corner of the settee, tucking her legs beneath her.
“Were you furious when she told you who she was?” she persisted, bracing herself for the worst.
“Furious?” Sebastian paused, considering the word. “No, not furious. Stunned, disbelieving at first, amazed…and very confused, I suppose. Once it began to sink in I realized I was bitter in some ways, at not having known she existed, yet relieved in others. I’ve never been interested in babies or children, never wanted any of my own—you knew that, of course, which was why you decided not to tell me at the time. I understand that much. But how,” he said with a flash of controlled anger laced with resentment, “could you have kept it from me all these years?”
To her horror, Roz, who scarcely ever cried, felt tears brimming against her lower eyelids.
“I didn’t want to lose you,” she said, her control sliding away as she realized that what she had most dreaded was now happening for real. With a trembling hand, she reached for the bottle of wine and filled her glass. “You would have thought I was trying to trap you. I couldn’t go through with an abortion, so I gave Nat up for adoption and tried to forget her. It never occurred to me for a moment that she’d ever try to find me when she grew up. Telling you afterward would only have made you hate me. I couldn’t do it, Sebastian. I needed you too much to ever risk losing you.”
