by Susan Lewis
It had taken a long time for him and Catrina to regain the closeness they’d lost, probably longer than he remembered now, but eventually he’d found that provided he didn’t torment himself with thoughts of Lisa and what she might be doing, he could immerse himself in the joy and relief of having his daughter back in his life. It was, in the end, what mattered most, because whatever mistakes her parents might have made, it would be the worst thing in the world to make her suffer for them. As adults, he kept reminding himself, they would get over the damage they’d caused one another, but an innocent child wasn’t equipped to deal with the harsh realities of life. She needed the security of her parents’ love to nourish her through her tender years, so that she’d be prepared to deal with the world when the time finally came for her to fly the nest.
It was true to say that neither he nor Catrina had ever dreamt of making the kind of money they eventually did. It was literally as though everything they touched turned to gold, whether it was renovating old properties and selling them on, or constructing entire new developments of flats and affordable housing. During their fourth year of official partnership, when Rosalind was twelve and they were celebrating thirteen years of marriage, they moved out of their three-storey house in Hotwells to a stunning Georgian mansion overlooking the Chew Valley lakes. With her by now locally famous flair for interior design, Catrina set about turning the grand old property into what became known as her masterpiece. Every room and niche, each stairwell and landing, window, attic, cellar and outbuilding, was lovingly and exquisitely restored to its original splendour. It was her pride and joy, and over the years its interior, and its gardens, came to feature in several glossy magazines, both national and international.
All that was missing in their lives by then was the longed-for second child. Though there had been several pregnancies since their reunion, each had ended in a miscarriage which had proved so devastating for Catrina, both mentally and physically, that in the end David had insisted that their beautiful healthy daughter was family enough for him. This was when Catrina had finally stopped subjecting herself to the need for a second child as a way to hang on to her husband, and had given up her womb to the hysterectomy the doctors were urging.
David’s decision to go into politics had come about one evening when he and Catrina were hosting one of their by now legendary dinners for several local dignitaries who included their MP, Jack Fielding, an eccentric old friend who was about to retire. Only later did David learn that Catrina had put them all up to persuading him to run for office, but that was typical of her, standing aside while other people took the credit for something that was her idea.
He stood at the next election and won the seat with a decent majority. Within a relatively short space of time he’d been appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Sport. A year later he was made Parliamentary Undersecretary at DEFRA, followed by a short spell in Work and Pensions, before achieving his promotion to the Foreign Office. Since Catrina was closely involved in each step of his career, this post was as big a cause for celebration for her as it was for him. They were on their way to the top, and with Colin Larch, the Foreign Secretary, being tipped as the next leader it was all in sight.
Then came the devastating news that Catrina had stage four breast cancer.
Though she fought the disease, and seemed to overcome it, in less than a year she was fighting it again, this time in the liver. The struggle was terrible. She was terrified of dying, and David couldn’t bear to think of losing her. It was during this time, when she was weak from the treatment and spaced out by drugs, that she started to talk about Lisa, whose name had never been mentioned since the day Catrina had returned to Bristol.
David was unable to understand why, with no evidence at all, Catrina seemed so convinced that he was either seeing Lisa while he was in London, or meeting up with her while he was travelling abroad. In the end, it was largely because of this false conviction and how much it was upsetting her that he’d resigned from his ministerial post in order to spend more time with her.
Though he’d never have admitted it, mainly because there was no reason to, the truth was Lisa had been on his mind a lot since he’d moved into the public eye. He’d found himself interested to know what she was doing now, and where she might be. Was she married? Did she have children? Was she even still in England? He dared to hope if she saw him on the news, or read about him in the papers, that she might get in touch, simply to say hello, but she never did.
It was always while he was away from home that the memory of her, and thoughts of what might have been, had seemed to draw so sharply into focus. Consequently when he did actually see her, quite unexpectedly, at an embassy party in Paris, he’d thought for a moment he must be dreaming.
It was an extraordinary moment, when everything around him seemed to fade, and even his mind felt blurred. The only clarity seemed to be her. She was talking to someone, but she must have known he was there, because she had glanced over and raised her eyebrows in greeting with no surprise at all. If anything, those mesmerising green sloe eyes that he remembered so well and that had hardly changed at all had looked slightly teasing.
From that moment on his struggle to stay focused on the politicians and dignitaries present was all but lost. Knowing she was in the room, and unable to control the way he was responding, was overwhelming him with a force he could never have foreseen. Behind the friendliness of his smile was a chaos of emotion, beneath each word he spoke were a thousand more he wanted to say to her. It surprised, yet excited him to realise how connected he felt to her. It was as though they were communicating on a level that was neither visible, nor audible – as though the ghosts of their younger selves were already merging and dispensing with all the intervening years.
If he’d thought she was beautiful when she was twenty, seeing her then, in her mid-thirties, so poised and elegant, and yet somehow, impossibly, more sensuous than ever, was completely blowing his mind. He knew he had to talk to her, to find out who she was now, why she was at this party, what she had been doing with her life since he’d last seen her. Was there a chance they could meet? Would she be willing? What would happen if they did?
Hearing his iPhone bleep again, David turned away from the past and felt the present closing in on him in a way that was oddly disorienting, which probably wasn’t surprising given how far he’d wandered down memory lane.
Retrieving the mobile from his pocket, he only remembered there was a text from Lisa when he saw it there on the screen, and experiencing an uplifting sense of pleasure and relief simply to see her name he opened the message. Then, realising how disloyal his feelings were to Catrina, he felt his conscience absorbing his joy into a darkness that only deepened when he read Lisa’s message.
You might want to see this, she’d written, and without having to go any further he guessed right away that she was forwarding a text from Rosalind.
He was right.
Would you be so quick to jump into my mother’s grave?
With a groan of anger that tailed off to exasperation and despair, he closed down the message and debated whether or not to call his daughter straight away. Her behaviour was outrageous and could not be tolerated, but her misunderstanding of the truth wasn’t going to be easily corrected, and an angry phone call now certainly wouldn’t do it. In fact, the way things were going he was half afraid nothing would.
Deciding to tackle her face to face when he was in Bristol at the weekend, he pressed in Lisa’s number and reached her on the second ring.
‘Hi,’ she said, in the kind of tone that never failed to reach his pulse.
‘Hi,’ he replied. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m at Amy’s going over the wedding plans. I take it you got the text.’
‘I did,’ he confirmed, and swivelled his chair to look out of the window again. ‘I’m sorry. Are you upset? Of course you are.’
‘Only for you.’
‘Do you have any idea w
hat prompted it?’
‘I think she came to the house while we were there. Someone was outside in a black car at the same time as the message turned up. I didn’t want to forward it, but Amy was with me, so I knew if I didn’t tell you she would.’
‘You have to keep me in the picture,’ he reminded her. ‘If you don’t I won’t be able to do anything about it.’
‘You’ve got enough on your mind.’
His frown deepened for a moment. She was right, he had, more than she realised, but he certainly wasn’t going to worry her with anything else. ‘What did Amy think of the house?’ he asked.
‘She loved it. Roxy was with us too. I think they’re planning to move in.’
He laughed. ‘Did it make you happy to be there?’ he asked. ‘It’s definitely what you want?’
With an incredulous cry, she said, ‘How could it not be, as long as you’re in it too?’
‘Is the right answer,’ he told her. ‘Did you see the builder? Actually, I spoke to him earlier, or was it yesterday? He’s still assuring me we’ll be in long before the wedding.’
‘It was yesterday,’ she replied, ‘and I told him just now that we’d better be, because with the ceremony happening there, and so many people flying in specially, such as the celebrant and the musicians … Why am I telling you this when you already know? I guess I’m just afraid that the whole thing will start to evaporate if I don’t keep pinning it down with words.’
Loving the way she could make light of her insecurity, maybe because it helped him to do the same with his own, he said, ‘You can tell me as many times as you like, I’m always happy to hear you sounding so happy. Now, what are the chances of you getting to Bristol tonight? I miss you, and I don’t feel like waiting till the weekend to see you.’
‘If you mean what are the chances of me getting to London, given that I’m already in Bristol, or near Bath, to be exact, then actually, pretty good. I had a call from …’
‘Hang on,’ he interrupted as the door opened. ‘What is it?’ he asked Miles.
‘Colin’s back,’ Miles told him, referring to the Foreign Secretary. ‘He wants to know if you can go over there.’
‘Tell him I’m on my way,’ David answered. Then going back to Lisa, ‘Sorry, I have to go,’ and he rang off.
It wasn’t until he was on his way out of the door that he realised how abrupt he must have sounded, so taking out his iPhone he quickly called her again, saying, ‘I could have done that better.’
‘You could,’ she confirmed. ‘But it’s OK, I’ll see you at the apartment tonight, unless something else comes up and you can’t make it.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t let it,’ he assured her.
Chapter Three
LISA WAS GAZING out of the carriage window, watching the countryside passing in a blur as the high-speed train whisked her from the West Country to Paddington. A newspaper was open in front of her, but she’d stopped reading a while ago, her mind being too full of the house and the wedding and the huge turnaround her life was taking for her to focus on much else for long.
To think that after all these years of flying solo, as Amy liked to put it, she was actually trampling over all her doubts about true love and commitment and throwing herself headlong back through time straight into the arms of the man she had no good reason to trust. She smiled warmly to herself. That was then, and this was now, and actually she wasn’t afraid. After all that had happened to her down the years, she doubted she was capable of being that hurt again. Besides, it wasn’t as if anything could go wrong this time around, or at least not in the way it had before.
And if that wasn’t tempting fate …
She’d always known that dropping out of uni had been her only choice back then. She simply couldn’t have stood to run into David with his wife, to have to pretend not to know him, or to watch him pretend not to know her. She’d been so devastated by their break-up that the only place to go, it seemed, was home. Her mother had done her best to comfort her, but Matilda, still in her forties at the time, had been working as a legal secretary back then and was, Lisa learned later, involved in a difficult relationship of her own. Since this meant that she hadn’t had much time available for a heartbroken younger daughter who’d thrown herself into an affair Matilda had always been dubious about anyway, it was left to Amy, who’d already graduated from Exeter and didn’t yet have a permanent job, to decide that the only cure for a broken heart was adventure. So, in her inimitably capable way, Amy had whisked Lisa off to Paris where their aunt, who officially resided in Monaco, kept an apartment in the Seventh arrondissement. During the first weeks they were there Lisa had remained inconsolable, and had so longed for David to get in touch that she could only wonder now how Amy had managed to put up with her.
They’d ended up staying in Paris for the next two years, working in bars and department stores and anywhere else that would have them, before moving on to Madrid, where they’d spent eighteen months experiencing great success either as tour guides, or teaching English as a second language. It was only a matter of weeks after they’d arrived at their next stop, Rome, that Amy had met Theo and fallen head over heels in love. He was there on secondment from a firm of British lawyers who were running an exchange programme with their Italian counterparts. Since he was due to return to London at the end of the month, and Amy couldn’t bear to be parted from him, Lisa had bidden her sister a tearful farewell and gone off to seek more adventure alone.
Having a natural gift for languages, she’d eventually fallen into a job working as an interpreter for an agency based in Geneva. More often than not she was flying all over the world translating for businessmen, politicians, lawyers, journalists, and on one memorable occasion a pair of Australian cannabis smugglers.
After three wonderfully exotic and exciting years circumnavigating the globe in private jets and first-class cabins, or being helicoptered on to the decks of luxury yachts, one of her regular clients made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. As the owner of a TV station in Hong Kong he was inviting her to present a new travel show they had in development. Since the idea appealed, she met the producers, was given a camera test and by the end of that same year her programme was airing all over the Far East and Australia. It was during this time that she’d met and fallen madly in love with Tony Sommerville, a fellow Englishman who was in Hong Kong for all sorts of reasons, one of which was to make fortunes out of other people’s money – in other words, he was an investment banker. To say he had charm was like saying a bank had cash – the supplies were endless and it bought him everything he ever wanted. Or, as she’d once told him, it was like saying a snake had venom, because he used his charm the same way, to stun his victim and rob them of everything. He’d laughed so hard at that that she’d slapped him.
Their relationship was tempestuous from the start, but it was also tender and loving, and so full of wild and wonderful surprises that in spite of never really trusting him, she could never bring herself to give him up. She was crazy about him, and knew that in his own way he felt the same about her, but as for marrying him and settling down to have the family they both wanted, she knew she’d be insane even to consider it. He simply didn’t have it in him to live a normal life back in England, which was where she wanted to end up, close to her sister and most of all to her niece, Roxy, whom she absolutely adored.
Three years had now gone by since she’d returned to London to join the team of a new Sunday lifestyle magazine. Tony hadn’t come after her, as she’d expected when their relationship had broken up, nor had he tried to persuade her to change her mind. In fact he’d hardly been in touch at all, which should have made it easier for her to get on with her life, but discovering that she hadn’t meant as much to him as she’d thought had made it even harder to get over him. It wasn’t until she’d met David again that she’d realised how foolish she was being to hold on to a dream that could never possibly come true. In spite of everything he said, Tony really wasn’t the marry
ing kind, and as fantastic as he might be with Roxy, and probably every other child he met, the very thought of him as a father could only fill her with relief these days that she’d never fallen pregnant while they were together.
She had no idea where he was now, nor did she wish to know.
While she was out there gallivanting around the globe Amy and Theo had moved to Somerset, where Theo had become a senior partner with a law firm in Bath and Amy had landed a job as the events manager for a local country house hotel. Roxy had gone to school locally, and Amy and Lisa’s mother, five years after retiring, had taken up residence in a nearby warden-assisted community where they were able to help her cope with her sometimes crippling bouts of arthritis.
Though David was Amy’s local MP, Lisa had never run into him during her frequent visits, nor, apart from once after he’d been made Junior Minister, did she ever try to get in touch. She hadn’t heard back then, so she’d simply reminded herself that what had happened between them was a long time in the past. He’d probably forgotten all about her by now, she’d tell herself, though she still thought about him often, particularly when feeling lonely and despairing of ever meeting the right man.
By the time she finally ran into him at an embassy party in Paris, she’d been with the lifestyle magazine in London for almost six months, and was still a long way from getting over Tony. She’d been with Jean-Luc that night, a French diplomat who was a dear old friend and whose partner, Simon, had been unable to make the occasion. So, being in town she’d agreed to step in at the last minute, and since Jean-Luc was one of the few people she’d ever told about David, when they’d once exchanged stories about their early years, he’d understood perfectly when she’d informed him he’d be going home alone that night. It wasn’t that she’d intended to leave with David, far from it, it was simply that the shock of seeing him had affected her far more profoundly than she’d ever have expected. Fortunately she was self-composed enough not to let it show, and had even managed to look flirtatious, she thought, when she’d glanced at him, as though the last time they’d seen one another was no more than a month ago. In reality, finding herself in the same room as him had thrown her into such unexpected disarray that she’d ended up leaving the party without even saying goodbye to the host. Later, she’d regretted fleeing like a frightened Miss Bennet – after all, she was thirty-six years old by then, so she should have been able to handle herself with far more style. Unfortunately, though, age didn’t seem to be any sort of defence, or even ally, when it came to being confronted by the man she’d suddenly found herself every bit as attracted to then as she’d been back in her teens.
