by Taylor, Lulu
Her anger and irritation at Vanna’s visit drained away at once and she realised how petty and stupid she’d been to let jealousy get the better of her common sense. Of course he hadn’t planned it. How could he have? He was right – he hadn’t even known she’d be away.
John had folded his arms and was staring at her furiously. ‘Don’t you think you’d better enlighten me a little about what’s going on between you and Ben?’
Oh God. She wasn’t ready for this. She hadn’t yet worked out in her own mind what she felt about Ben. She tried to calm the fear washing around inside her, took a deep breath and said, ‘Nothing’s happened between us. We’re just friends.’
He nodded at her with a bitter, knowing look. ‘Okay. So – where have you been for the last few days?’
She was startled at the change in direction of his questioning and then her heart plummeted again. Oh God, what trap had she fallen into? This was the wrong time to tell him about Greece. She wanted to make sure he was in the right mood and this antagonism between them could surely lead to a disastrous outcome.
‘Well?’ His tone was low and almost menacing. ‘I’m waiting.’
She began to stammer. ‘Well, I . . . I—’
‘Because Janey told me you’d gone to spend a couple of days with your friend Helen in Italy. Sounds nice, I thought. Why don’t I go and join you out there? Maybe a break away from this place is what we need to improve things between us.’
Delilah’s palms were suddenly damp and a nasty tingle prickled her fingertips, but she could only listen as he went on, all the time staring at her like she was a criminal.
He continued: ‘So I called Helen to see if it would be okay. She hadn’t a clue where you were. You certainly weren’t staying with her, though once she realised that was what I thought, she tried to cover for you. You two really should have got your stories straight.’ He looked suddenly very sad. ‘I can see by your face that you’ve been caught out. I suppose you thought I’d never bother to check up on you, or you’d be back before me. But you reckoned without me coming home early. It was a pretty nasty bloody shock to find out you were not here – or where you told Janey you were going. And then there’s the real kicker.’ He smiled again but in the twisted way that showed it was anything but good humoured. ‘Ben isn’t here either. He’s not at his cottage. No one at Home Farm knows where he is. Perhaps you’d like to explain that.’
‘I have no idea where Ben might be,’ she said, her voice coming out in a strangled tone. ‘I honestly don’t. He didn’t even know I was going away. Besides, nothing has happened between us, I promise.’ It was true – up to a point.
‘Really?’ John said in a strange sing-song way. ‘After all, he’s a good-looking boy. Strong, outdoors type. Your honest farmer sort. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were tempted, considering how things are for us at the moment. Did you two decide to slip away together while I wasn’t here? A nice little romantic getaway with lots of fiery sex?’
She felt tears of anger and frustration sting her eyes but was determined not to give in to them. ‘No! For God’s sake, John, stop it! I haven’t been with Ben and I don’t know where he is! Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ring him.’ She looked at him miserably and said in a sad voice, ‘I want us to be happy, like we were when we got married. Before we came to live here and it all began to go wrong.’
His gaze held the same agonised confusion. ‘Then tell me where you were over the last couple of days.’
‘I . . . I can’t!’
‘You can’t?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘What do you mean by that?’
She thought of the letter tucked into her luggage. Should she just produce that now? Throw it at him and say, Here’s the proof I wasn’t with Ben. I was with your mother. ‘I will tell you. But not now.’
‘I want to know right now.’
‘No.’
‘Come on – tell me where you were.’ He suddenly sounded broken. He put his hands to his head. ‘For Christ’s sake, Delilah, can’t you see this is destroying me? Why are you lying to me?’
‘I’m not lying to you,’ she said wretchedly, wondering how they’d arrived at this sorry situation and all the tangled misunderstandings.
‘Then tell me.’
‘All right.’ Her head drooped and she stared at the ancient carpet, wondering for the hundredth time why it hadn’t been replaced years ago. ‘All right. I’ll tell you. But it’s a long story. I’m going to take a shower first. We’ll meet at dinner and I’ll tell you everything.’
They sat opposite each other in the round dining room where the table had been laid for a formal dinner. Outside the French doors the lawn stretched away, its vibrant green yellowed a little from the long dry spell. There was a hint of coming rain in the fuzziness of the blue sky and the bank of cloud approaching in the distance. Delilah wondered if Janey noticed the awkward atmosphere as she put the plates of roast lamb in front of them.
‘Thank you, Janey,’ Delilah said, managing a smile.
‘You’re welcome. Well, I’m off for the evening now. I hope you enjoy it and see you tomorrow.’
When Janey had gone, the sense of heavy expectation grew. Delilah stared at her plate, and the rich aroma of roasted meat with the strong scent of rosemary and garlic turned her stomach. She didn’t think she’d be able to eat anything. The anxiety of how she would tell John the truth had been knotting her insides more and more tightly as the moment grew closer and now she felt sick with it.
John did not seem to be having any problem. He heaped vegetables onto his plate with a kind of determination not to let all this spoil his dinner. When he had had a good load, well anointed with gravy, he sat back in his chair, fixed Delilah with a direct gaze and said, ‘I’m ready. Off you go.’
‘All right. But I’ll need to tell you how it started. Please don’t be impatient – it’s important.’
She began haltingly, explaining about the clothes she had found in the attic and how she had realised they belonged to his mother, then she described how her curiosity was piqued by the things she stumbled across in the house – photographs and references to the mother who remained wreathed in mystery: where was her grave? How had she died? If she had thrown herself from the folly, why wasn’t it known about?
‘So you decided to find out more,’ John said grimly. He’d been stony-faced and silent until now.
She nodded. ‘You seemed to be so unhappy because of it. Ever since I’ve met you, you’ve told me that this house is a place that oppresses you, and that the past is all around you here, torturing you. I thought at first you didn’t really mean it, that it was a way of dealing with the privilege you were born to. Then I became sure it was the trauma of losing your mother so young that caused your depression and the nightmares. I didn’t realise that there was even more than I suspected, until I heard Elaine’s name.’
John flinched very slightly, and continued eating as he waited for her to carry on.
‘I couldn’t think who this Elaine was. It was only because I’d looked for your mother’s grave that I found out she was your dead sister. You see . . .’ She looked at him pleadingly, pushing away her plate of cooling food. ‘I felt that if I knew the truth, I could help you. Then things happened that propelled me along the path. I found the doll—’
‘The doll?’ he asked, frowning.
‘A Sindy, tucked in the back of the cupboard. Who did it belong to? You told me there hadn’t been any daughters in your family. And then . . .’ She stopped and stared down at the way the light gleamed along the handles of her silver cutlery. ‘The letter came.’
John stopped eating and looked at her as if aware that this was the beginning of the real explanation. Everything so far had been groundwork, designed to help understand her state of mind, to show him that she hadn’t planned to be deceitful; she wanted him to know that her motives were pure, but events had begun to push her towards concealment.
‘A letter came addressed to Lady Northmoor. You
’d already left to go fishing so I couldn’t show it to you. I was curious – nosy, perhaps – and . . . I opened it.’ She glanced at him quickly. What would it mean to him when she mentioned that letter and his dead mother? Wasn’t it ghoulish that it should arrive forty years after her death?
He seemed whiter than before and sat stiller in his chair, lifting his eyes to hers with a kind of blank, numbed expression, but otherwise he seemed to take the revelation calmly. He said, ‘You opened it.’
‘It was on impulse,’ she said quickly. ‘It occurred to me that maybe it was meant for me – I know that sounds stupid but it seemed a reasonable thought at the time. I opened it before I had time to think. It was from a solicitors’ firm, and it was telling this person, Lady Northmoor, that she was getting an increase in her living allowance. The letter had a different address to the envelope. One in Greece.’
John’s expression changed to one of complete realisation. He threw back his head for a moment, staring at the ceiling, his arms out wide on the table, then he said loudly, ‘And you thought, I know! I’ve got a wizard idea! I’ll just pop over to Greece and see who this Lady Northmoor person is!’ He faced her again, his eyes full of accusation. ‘That’s what you did, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘You went over there and decided to mess with a situation you knew nothing about! Without breathing a word to me!’
‘I didn’t want to hurt you even more by raking it all up again for no reason. You’d told me your mother was dead and that’s obviously what you believed so why would I risk causing you unnecessary pain?’ She stared at him pleadingly. Then as she gazed at him, a sudden certainty possessed her, a revelation that as soon as she thought it, she knew was true. She took a deep breath. ‘But you already knew, didn’t you? You already knew she was alive.’
There was a long, frozen silence and then John got up, throwing his napkin down on his plate, and strode over to the curved French windows that gave out onto the lawn behind the house.
She turned to watch him, twisting in her seat, feeling as though she’d been a fool. All along she’d believed that he was trapped inside a dreadful lie. But that wasn’t the case. The only person who hadn’t known the truth was her. She tried to adjust everything to this new reality. ‘You did, didn’t you? You knew she was alive! How long have you known?’
He gave a great sigh, putting his hands in his pockets. At last he said, ‘I’ve known for about as long as I’ve known you.’
‘What?’ she said, her lips feeling suddenly dry.
‘I’ve got power of attorney now, you see. I’ve had it for a while, so my father’s business affairs are an open book to me. But he’d left instructions that I wasn’t to be told about my mother living in Greece until after his death or her death, or unless there were unavoidable circumstances that meant I had to know. The solicitors managed to cook up one of those unavoidable circumstances between them over the Greek euro crisis and whether or not my mother’s allowance would be guaranteed no matter what might happen to the banks there. So they summoned me to London and, in that cold official way of theirs, they broke the news that my mother was living on an island in Greece, and what would I like to do about guaranteeing her allowance?’
She was filled with pity for him. ‘You’ve known since then?’
He nodded. ‘I thought I could come to terms with it. But it’s been eating away at me ever since.’
No wonder he had been subject to those black moods of despair. No wonder he had wanted his mother’s clothes burnt. How could anyone begin to understand something like that? She said softly, ‘What did you do when you found out?’
He turned to look at her and smiled his funny lopsided smile. ‘I came to find you.’
‘I don’t understand.’ She had the disconcerting feeling that she’d been playing an unwitting role in all of this for far longer than she’d realised, as though she’d been dancing a waltz while asleep.
‘I needed something good and true in my life. I’d been thinking about you ever since the day of the shoot. You stood out among all those ditzy fashion people in your normal clothes and in the way you seemed so natural. I liked the pencil in your hair, and the way we laughed together at the madness of everything . . . it struck something in me. That day I found myself walking to your offices and asking to see you. The moment I laid eyes on you . . . it was like the sun coming up after a black night. You were so beautiful and so real, and so untouched by all the darkness. I felt like I needed you. You made me believe I might find love and happiness and all the things I wanted so badly. When we fell in love, I hoped that our relationship would blot out what I’d discovered. I wanted it to make me forget.’
Delilah looked at the table, her heart aching for him. ‘And I wanted to make you remember.’
He let out a long breath, his shoulders slumping a little. ‘It was wrong of me to ask so much. I should have guessed it was impossible – unfair on you, for one thing. You didn’t even know that I wanted you to be the magic fairy who would make all the badness disappear.’
‘Oh, John.’ She looked back at him, biting her lip. He seemed tired and beaten, his grey eyes full of sadness. She loved him so much. Had she failed him? ‘I only wanted what was right for you,’ she whispered. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘I’ve been a beast to you, I know that. I can’t blame you for . . . well, for responding when someone like Ben turns on the charm, not after the way I’ve been.’ Is he apologising? she wondered, surprised. But before she could begin to ponder it, he said in a low voice, ‘So what happened in Greece? You’d better tell me everything.’
He remained at the window, staring out at the deepening twilight as she told her tale of going to the island, of hearing the English voice at the monastery and then finding the Villa Artemis and finally Alexandra herself.
John stood very still as she recounted everything up to the meeting. ‘How was she?’ he asked in a curiously flat voice. ‘What did she look like?’
‘She looked very like her photographs. She wore a headscarf so I didn’t see her hair. Her face was older, of course, and lined . . . darker too from the sun. But her eyes were the same. Very vivid blue, the same shape. She seemed . . .’ Delilah thought, trying to find the right word to describe Alexandra. ‘She seemed incredibly and deeply alone. The loneliest person I’ve ever met.’
John turned back to her at last. ‘And what did she say?’
‘She told me that she’d always loved you. She wouldn’t say why she left but she did insist that it was for the best, that it was the only thing she could do. Of course I asked her how she could leave you when you needed her so much, even if she was in desperate pain about Elaine’s death. She told me that even if Elaine hadn’t died, she would have gone. She even claimed that it would have been better if she’d died but your father begged her to spare herself.’ Delilah hoped she was treading as lightly as possible over John’s pain while telling him the truth that he clearly needed to hear. ‘Do you have any idea why she would think that?’
He walked over to her and sank down in the chair next to her, his shoulders slumped, his hands clasped. He shook his head. She reached out and stroked his dark, silver-threaded hair – more silver threads lately, she thought – and rubbed his shoulder.
‘I’ve got no bloody idea,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s all too much for me to understand.’
‘She obviously thinks she’s to blame for Elaine’s death. I wondered if that was why she felt too wicked to stay here with you but she said that wasn’t it. But . . .’ Delilah took a deep breath. This was the moment she had most feared. ‘She said that you would eventually discover that she hadn’t died and she asked me to give you this.’ Slowly, she drew the slender folded envelope out of her pocket and held it out to John.
He looked up, frowning, his eyes reddened, and saw what she was holding out. An expression of horror passed over his face and he shook his head, recoiling from it. ‘No, no, no!’ he said fiercely. ‘I don’t want it!�
�� ‘You don’t have to read it now. Perhaps it’s best to wait.’ ‘No, you don’t understand. She’s not coming back into this house. Not in any way.’ John pushed back the chair and stood up, his eyes panicked. ‘I can’t have that. She can’t do that to me, she can’t start coming back now. I’ve spent a lifetime accepting that she’s dead and I won’t undo it now, do you understand? I won’t start all over again like that! I couldn’t stand it!’ His voice was rising with a mixture of fear and anger.
She rose to her feet, still clutching the letter, holding it out to him. ‘But, John—’
‘Stop it!’ he yelled. She gasped at the ferocity of his voice, staring at him wide-eyed and stunned. ‘Haven’t you caused enough bloody trouble? Don’t you understand what you’ve done? You can’t just go down to the underworld and fetch back the dead and say, There you are, it’s all right now, isn’t it? It doesn’t work like that! Don’t you understand that I want her dead! She had her chance and she made her choice. She chose death. She chose to be away from me year after year. If she’d killed herself in a moment of madness, I could have understood and forgiven. But to keep rejecting me the way she did . . . It’s unbearable, can’t you understand? I refuse to have her brought back to life to make me suffer in new ways. Don’t you see? It’s easier for me if she’s dead.’
He snatched the letter from her and tore it to shreds, scattering the pieces all over the table and the remains of their meal.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘It’s over. It’s what I’ve been trying to make myself believe for the last seven months. She’s dead.’
Then he turned and walked out of the room, leaving her staring after him in shock.
Chapter Thirty-Three
In bed that night after the revelation of her trip to Greece, Delilah did what she always did when John was low: she used her whole body to comfort him, wrapping him in her embrace and trying to give some of her life force to him. He lay there, absorbing her comfort for a while, and then he turned to fold her in his arms and take her mouth with his. He seemed possessed by an angry and desperate need as he reached for her, running his hands over her body as if using it only to spur his own desire rather than to cherish it and love it. He squeezed and pinched at her breasts, bit down on her lips and pressed his fingers roughly between her legs, as though his lust needed an element of something hard and fierce. He didn’t hurt her, but she felt like a vessel rather than a partner as his hands and mouth moved over her. He tugged at her nipples with his teeth while his hands pushed her legs wider, exploring her with a ferocious need. She did not resist or even attempt to return caresses. She sensed that he didn’t require that. His arousal stemmed not from her but from working on her, and all she had to do was be there, his willing object. They had never made love like this before and she found it strange and almost frightening. It had always been the two of them making love to each other, and now for the first time she wondered where he was in his head. He seemed almost absent as he turned her over with needy hands and plunged into her as she knelt on the bed with her back to him. She absorbed the pressure as he thrust forward, his hands on her hips as though to propel her forward and back in time to his own movements. The action began to stimulate her despite her slight sense of disconnection from him. She gasped out loud as he rammed himself home inside her, and that aroused him further to stronger, harder movements. She began to moan without meaning to as each thrust hit her deep and hard, and then she wanted to turn around to him, to kiss him, to have him pressed tight against her so that they could ride this wave of desire together to the end. But she couldn’t move. He wanted to keep her there, she realised; he was pressing more of his weight down on her, his hand now on her shoulder and then heavy on the side of her neck. She began to resist the thrusts as they grew harder, but he was caught up in his lust now, producing a guttural noise in his throat with each slam into her. He went faster, pistoning in and out as she gasped for breath and tried to take the shock of the motion without being driven forward into the bedhead. Then he reached his peak and with a grunt of release he poured out his climax into her, letting it subside completely before withdrawing with a sigh. He reached to her night table and pulled some tissues out of the box there, passing two to her and keeping one for himself.
