The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Please let me pass,’ she said for the third time, and summoning up all her strength she moved, one foot before the other, nearer and nearer to him, praying that he would give way. He did not. She side-stepped, trampling small yellow flowers. His hand shot out, lean and strong, encircling her wrist, holding her fast.

  ‘Nancy!’

  ‘Let me go!’ Her voice was choked with unshed tears and fear. They were far from the cultivated gardens and grounds. Far from the revellers at the poolside. He had slapped her semi-conscious within yards of scores of people. What might he do to her here, out of sight and out of earshot?

  ‘What happened, for Christ’s sake? Why did you leave?’ And then, with naked ferociousness, ‘Why him?’

  ‘Why not?’ she shouted back. ‘Is promiscuity a male prerogative?’

  He blasphemed, whirling her around, slamming her hard against the trunk of a tree, the weight of his body forcing her to be still.

  His mouth came down hard on hers, his hands brutal. From the depth of her being came an anguished sob and instead of struggling, instead of fighting, she wound her fingers desperately in the coarseness of his hair and slipped her tongue willingly past his as he took her fiercely where she stood.

  ‘Mrs Cameron booked her suite privately, sir. I’m afraid I would have to have her permission before allowing you to share occupancy.’

  ‘Mrs Cameron is my wife!’ Jack said icily, aware of the interest being shown by a couple of guests passing by.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, we have you booked in Suite 17 and your secretary in Room 25.’

  Jack leaned threateningly over the mahogany polished surface of the desk. ‘I wish to be in the same suite as my wife,’ he repeated, his fingers itching to grab the collar of the desk clerk and throttle him to death for the embarrassment he was causing. Unless he shared a suite with Nancy, rumours would be rife.

  ‘My dear senator, how delightful to see you after so many years.’ Zia swept forward, heavy ropes of grey and white baroque pearls hanging waist-length against a flowing dress of pale lilac chiffon. ‘Is there a problem?’

  Jack took a deep, steadying breath, smiled his practised, charming smile and said with a tightly controlled composure, ‘I naturally wish to occupy the same suite as my wife. I appear to have been booked in on a different floor.’

  ‘Ah,’ Zia laughed, a graceful wave of her hand dismissing such a trifling inconvenience. ‘Mrs Cameron’s suite is exceptionally small.’

  Guido lowered his eyes. A bedroom fit for a Tsarina, two drawing rooms furnished with a Matisse and a Picasso, a palatial bathroom with gold fittings, and an extensive terrace hardly amounted to a small suite.

  ‘Suite 17 is much larger and no doubt it will be of very little inconvenience to move Mrs Cameron if she so wishes.’

  There was something under the lightness of Zia’s voice that brooked no opposition.

  With extreme bad grace Senator Cameron allowed his trunks and valises to be ferried to Suite 25. Syrie, in her role as dutiful secretary and personal assistant, disappeared unobtrusively behind them.

  ‘A drink and a rest while the maids unpack for you,’ Zia was saying disarmingly, leading him firmly away from the foyer and towards her own private apartments. She had no idea where Nancy was, but the senator’s mood indicated that it would be better if they did not meet publicly. Jack Cameron had the sense to be flattered by the personal welcome he was receiving from Zia Sanford. Very few people were entertained in Zia’s private garden: only the closest of friends and reigning royalty, and not even all royalty, gained entrance.

  His temper soothed by being singled out as a person of importance, his impatience curbed by excellent wine, Jack sat beneath Zia’s jacaranda tree and with the air of a man of world affairs brought Zia up to date with the happenings in America.

  Zia listened to him with half an ear. Where was Ramon? He would have sized the situation up at a glance and speedily captured the Montcalms or the Michaeljohns to join them and spare her the tedium of Jack Cameron’s ceaseless monologue.

  ‘The President is continuing to widen his powers. The depression was bad and hit hard but it’s now well in hand. There’ll be a free gold market, tariff control …’

  Zia fixed an interested look on her delicately boned face. Where was Nancy? She hadn’t seen her all day and it was now late afternoon.

  ‘Of course Henry Morgenthau Junior wouldn’t have been my choice for the Treasury Secretaryship but he’ll do a good job. He’s a disciple of Professor George F. Warren of Cornell and I go along all the way with Warren’s commodity dollar theories.’

  Zia wondered if she wasn’t carrying charity too far and should simply unleash Senator Cameron on her unsuspecting guests.

  ‘That’s what has launched the Administration on its current dollar devaluation experiment …’

  Politics had never been boring with Chips. She wondered what he thought of his son-in-law. La Guardia was mayor of New York now. She would have liked to ask Jack Cameron what his father-in-law thought of that particular changeover in local government but shrank from the hour-long lecture that would ensue.

  ‘Roosevelt has lifted the curb on Agency finance …’

  Zia had always thought she would have liked the Roosevelts. Eleanor was so serious and devoted: FDR so blue-eyed and charming, sexually attractive despite his wheelchair. What would the White House be like with Jack Cameron in it? She suppressed a smile. Nancy had been right. In spoiling his chances of nomination she was doing her country a favour.

  She laid a hand lightly on his arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Senator, I’m keeping you and you will want to bathe and change for dinner. I was so rivetted by your explanation of the President’s policies, that I simply forgot the time.’

  Jack smiled indulgently. He liked to be addressed as ‘Senator’ and he liked Zia Sanford.

  Zia’s staff ushered him from her presence and Zia rose to her feet and wandered over to the far edge of the velvety lawn. The pools, the tennis courts, the gardens were all hidden from view. No one could see into Zia’s domain from the public terraces or grounds. Down below her the seldom used pathways that wound to the rocks were empty. It would soon be cocktail hour. The ladies would be changing: the gentlemen resting. A rustle of leaves and a sudden flutter of birds caught her attention. Two figures emerged momentarily, heads close together, arms around each other’s waists. Zia stiffened, straining her eyes into the rapidly approaching twilight. The path curved, the trees gave way. They were walking slowly, arms wrapped tightly around each other’s bodies. This was no casual embrace but a fierce clinging and a desperate holding that could be seen in every line of their bodies. She had known it was her son the instant she had caught sight of them. It was the woman she had been unsure of. That dark head of hair could have belonged to Madeleine Mancini or Viscountess Lothermere or a score of other females esconsed under Sanfords’roofs. It did not. The dark curls resting on her son’s shoulder, the slender arms holding on to him so steadfastly, were those of Nancy Leigh Cameron.

  Zia walked unsteadily back to her seat beneath the jacaranda tree and did the unimaginable. She poured herself a drink without ringing for someone to do it for her.

  Ramon and Nancy. She closed her eyes. Ramon nearly killing himself in pent up anger over an unnamed woman. Nancy grieving and abandoning her marriage for an unnamed man. Nancy flirting recklessly and uncharacteristically with Prince Vasileyev; Ramon proposing marriage to a child he had known scarcely a week.

  Ramon and Nancy. Nancy and Ramon.

  It was the fitting end to a three-act Greek tragedy. Her hand trembled as it reached for her glass. Tragedy. There could be no happiness for them: if Chips did not tell them, she would have to. It would have been better if Patrick O’Shaughnessy had never saved Duarte Sanford from the icy seas of the Atlantic. Then she and Chips would have grown up poor but happy, in Boston’s North End. There would have been no Duarte: no long nightmare years, and no son either. She opened her eyes wearily: no dashing, h
andsome, unbelievably magnificent son. Impossible to wish that life had been otherwise if it would have robbed her of Ramon. She felt cold and unutterably tired. The trees and sea and sky darkened and merged and the glass fell from her hand.

  She was sobbing, clinging to him, self-control gone and sanity rapidly following. The smell of sex hung between them: sex and love. Love and longing. He had meant to hurl her away in contempt. He had raped her and she had given to him freely, willingly. He held on to her, trembling, an inner war raging and burning. At last he could stand it no longer. He slammed his fist into the tree.

  ‘Why?’ he yelled. ‘Why leave me? Why take Vasileyev for a lover? Winterton? In God’s name, Nancy, why?’

  Her eyes were two black hollows in her whitened face. Without the support of the tree she would have fallen.

  ‘I trusted you.’ Her voice was a mere whisper. ‘I thought you loved me. I knew I loved you. I told my daughter so; my husband …’ Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth, ‘… my father.’

  Ramon drew in an agonized breath. Something terrible flamed through his dark eyes.

  ‘He told me about Gloria. He had dates, photographs.’

  His hands grasped her shoulders savagely. ‘Gloria was a cheap, transient affaire. As meaningless as the hundreds that had gone before her.’ He raised his face to the heavens as if seeking for a strength suddenly denied him. She waited, her pulses pounding. He lowered his head, her eyes meeting hers.

  ‘It’s true that the fact she was the wife of my father’s enemy added amusement. But I never loved her. I never loved any woman but you.’

  ‘You went to her after me.’ Her voice sounded alien, a racking sob of accusation that could not possibly have come from her. ‘You went to her the day after I left New York.’

  His voice was barely controlled, his fingers imprisoning her. ‘She came to me! She came because I finished the affaire.’

  She could see only his face, his eyes, his mouth. ‘You weren’t lovers?’ Her voice was barely audible.

  ‘Mae de Deus! What kind of a man do you think I am? I loved you! I told you I loved you!’ The intensity of his emotions sublimated English upbringing and American genes. He was totally Latin.

  Her relief was absolute. She was laughing and crying at the same time, clinging to him, kissing him. ‘How could you put me through so much hell – so much agony?’

  ‘Me? Put you through agony?’ A nerve throbbed at his temple. ‘What about Winterton? What about Vasileyev?’

  She seized his face in her hands, pulling it down to hers. Explanations could wait. They didn’t matter any more. All that mattered was that he loved her and she loved him. His mouth was on hers, on her throat, on her breast, and when he lowered her willingly beneath him on the trampled flowers and entered her, it was with the tenderness of absolute love.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dusk was beginning to filter through the thick foliage when he at last drew her to her feet and into the circle of his arms.

  ‘And now,’ he said for the third time, ‘what about Winterton and Vasileyev?’

  Despite the tenderness with which he was holding her, there was a dangerous glint of green in his near-black eyes.

  Her arms were around his waist, her head against the strength of his chest. ‘Vere was never my lover,’ she said softly.

  ‘Then my arrival was timely.’ There was dry humour in his voice.

  She smiled. She had thought she would never forget the horror of that dreadful scene. Now it was already blurring.

  ‘Yes.’ He tilted her face up to his.

  ‘I never wanted to take Vere as a lover. I was lonely and he cared for me and I thought perhaps it would help the hurt and the pain that losing you created.’

  ‘And Nicky?’

  She held his eyes steadily. ‘Nicky was my lover. For one night.’

  ‘I see.’ His voice told her that he did not.

  She twisted her fingers through his and now it was she who held him, her eyes wide and dark and full of honesty.

  ‘When I came here it was to escape you, not to find you. You had told me once that Madeira was out of bounds to you, and I believed you. I thought it was the one place in the world where I would not accidentally see or meet you. I could have packed my bags and fled, but I had nowhere to flee to.’ Her voice thick-ened. ‘Besides, once faced with your nearness again, I no longer had the strength to move away from it. You were like a magnet to me. No matter how indifferent you were, how cruel, I had to have the solace of at least seeing you.

  ‘When I saw you with Tessa, when I saw how young and pretty she was, how adoring, when I saw the way you looked at her and held her, I could bear it no longer. It was then that Nicki and I became lovers. I needed physical comfort. I needed to be loved, however transiently.’ She smiled: a small crooked smile, willing him to understand. ‘Nicki is a man who takes many lovers – as you did. They mean nothing to him as they meant nothing to you. He is not in love with me, nor I with him. For a brief moment in time we needed each other and gave to each other. That is all.’

  ‘Can you forgive me?’ His eyes were brilliant with pain.

  Her kiss was his answer. Long and deep and full of love.

  Slowly, arms entwined, they began to climb the path to the hotel.

  ‘Jack is on his way here,’ she said. ‘But then you’ll know that already.’

  ‘I didn’t, but it makes no difference.’

  ‘No.’

  They continued in silence. She could feel the heat of his body against the filmy silk of her dress, the strength of his thigh against hers. Some of the old mockery was back in his voice as he said:

  ‘I’ll have some explaining to do to Zia. I told her only hours ago that I was going to marry Tessa Rossman.’

  She halted, her eyes huge. ‘And were you?’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, so help me. But only because I couldn’t have you and if I didn’t have you it didn’t matter who I had.’

  ‘But that poor child …’

  He silenced her with a kiss. ‘That poor child is none the wiser.’

  She shivered suddenly. ‘If you hadn’t come … If you’d stayed in New York … If you’d gone to Paris or Rome or …’

  He halted, his hands on her shoulders, staring down at her with impatient amusement. ‘Don’t you still understand? My coming here wasn’t an accident. I came here because I knew you were here. What do you think I did in New York when you didn’t arrive? Shrugged my shoulders?’

  ‘No. I don’t know …’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I did.’ His voice was grim again. ‘I drove to Hyannis to fetch you by force. But you weren’t there.’ His rage and pain were transparent. She trembled at the realization of his desire and love for her.

  ‘Your butler told me that the mayor had had a heart attack and that you had left for Madeira.’

  She held on to him, her legs suddenly weak. He felt her response and suddenly grinned.

  ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t barge in on him, but I would have done if the shipping line hadn’t confirmed you had sailed aboard the Mauretania. I followed on the Bremen and picked up the Kezia at Southampton.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  The harsh lines that had gathered around his mouth softened. ‘That I was mad. That you were mad. That you had run away from me. That you were waiting for me. By the time I reached Madeira I was sure it was the latter. You had to be waiting for me. I couldn’t come to terms with any other alternative.’

  ‘And so you came to my room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were silent, mimosa blossom drifting above them, catching in their hair.

  After a little while she said gently, ‘I’m sorry, Ramon. I should have stayed in New York and faced you with my father’s accusations.’

  ‘No more apologies. No more “might have been”.’

  Sanfords’ honey-gold walls and rose-red roofs could be seen between the last of the trees.

  ‘I love you, lady. That�
��s all that matters.’

  They kissed for a long time, then walked through the flowers and trees and across the lawn, hand in hand.

  Bobo, in a pair of glorious cerise velvet lounging pants and very little else, halted in her conversation with Luke Golding and stared. Costas chuckled and dived into the pool for a last swim. When Nancy kicked over the traces, she did so all the way. First Winterton, then Vasileyev, now Sanford. He surfaced with a wide grin and shook the water from his eyes. Jack oh-so-careful Cameron had a rebellion on his hands. Costas wondered how he would handle it.

  Lady Michaeljohn’s lips closed in a grim line of disapproval. She blamed it on the mother. She should never have married an American. They were unstable and immoral, and this was the result: a married daughter flaunting an intimacy with a single gentleman. Not, she thought as she snapped her spectacle case shut, that Ramon Sanford had ever come under the heading of gentleman.

  Georgina saw them from her balcony and frowned. What was Nancy doing? Didn’t she know Jack had arrived? Besides, she had been sure that last night Nicki and Nancy had slipped away away from the ballroom. Nicki had been looking very pleased with himself all day, and it was obvious that the Hedley girl had been crying. Thoughtfully she sat at her dressing table whilst her maid brushed her hair. It was time she talked to Nancy. Indiscretions were one thing. Scandals another.

  Zia’s aides saw Ramon’s approach and were oblivious of his companion. Villiers hurried towards them, his narrow, ascetic face an unpleasant shade of grey.

  ‘Madame has been taken ill …’

  Ramon broke into a run and Nancy followed, hampered by her high heels. When she breathlessly reached the door of Zia’s room Ramon was already at his mother’s side, her hand in his. Nancy stood awkwardly, not wanting to intrude. The staff surrounded her, instinctively giving mother and son an element of privacy.