Stolen Beginnings

by Susan Lewis

  ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have realised it was you if I hadn’t known you were here. Your hair suits you like that, you look . . .’

  ‘Madeleine’s in here,’ she interrupted, and passing him, she walked ahead into the sitting-room. Shrugging, though mildly put out by her apparent indifference, he followed.

  Madeleine was still standing in the centre of the room, and as Paul walked in, her violet eyes – the eyes he had come to love so much – darkened with pain. He saw immediately that she had lost weight, and her beautiful face seemed almost gaunt. Marian went to stand beside her, as if to protect her, and for one blinding instant he wanted to kill her. But then his eyes returned to Madeleine’s and he saw that behind the fear and mistrust there was a hunger; it was as if she was fighting to hold herself back from him. Since she’d agreed to see him he had considered a thousand different ways of how he would begin, but now, seeing her so torn apart he merely held out his arms and whispered, ‘My darling. Oh, my darling.’

  As Madeleine moved towards him, Marian lifted a hand to stop her, but before she had a chance to touch her Madeleine threw herself onto Paul’s chest and clung to him like a child.

  ‘You don’t know how sorry I am,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve missed you so much. Deidre told me about your aunt. Oh, Maddy, I don’t know what to say.’

  His eyes were closed, but Marian waited, willing him to look at her. Even if she weren’t prepared to say so in front of Madeleine, she wanted him to know that she knew he was lying. Matthew had told him about Celia’s death the day after she’d left New York.

  But as he took Madeleine’s face between his hands, he didn’t look at Marian. ‘Can we talk?’ he said, kissing her gently on the forehead.

  Madeleine turned to Marian. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Again Marian looked at Paul, but he was gazing at Madeleine.

  As she walked up the stairs to her room, Marian’s footsteps were slow, and there was no denying that the suddenness of their reunion and the power Paul seemed to have over Madeleine had shaken her. It confused her even more that, despite what he had done, despite the lies he had told, she was now in no doubt that he loved Madeleine. In fact, the power of his love was so strong that the moment he set eyes on Madeleine, even she, Marian, had felt it. It was like a living thing that fused them together, making them, in some peculiar way, into the same person. It was the first time Marian had seen them together, and she realised now that there was a great deal more to their love than she’d believed and for some reason, it made her feel uneasy. She hesitated, listening for their voices, wondering what he was saying to her, but then, annoyed with herself for trying to eavesdrop, she ran on up the stairs. When she reached the top she heard the sitting-room door close, and she shivered: she had the uncanny feeling that Paul had been watching her . . .

  Turning back from the door, Paul took Madeleine’s hands and led her to the sofa. He sat down with her, his arms around her, and started to smooth the hair back from her face. ‘You know it was for the book, don’t you?’ he whispered.

  ‘Well, I . . . Well . . . Oh Paul, I wanted it to be, I kept telling myself it was, but I just didn’t know.’

  Suddenly his head dropped back and he shut his eyes tightly as if he were in pain. ‘Oh God!’ he groaned. ‘I can’t tell you what all this has done to me too, Maddy. I knew I loved you before, but now . . . Oh Maddy, hold me, for God’s sake, hold me. Tell me you forgive me, tell me that nothing’s changed between us.’

  She lifted her arms and brought his head down to her shoulder, and as the tears ran down her face she thought of Enrico, and how she had held him the same way. She’d thought about Paul then, wanting to share the same closeness with him, and now he was here, vulnerable at last, and she loved him so much she wanted to go on holding him forever. ‘I forgive you,’ she said, kissing his face. ‘I’d forgive you anything, Paul. I still love you. I missed you so much.’

  ‘Did you? Did you truthfully?’

  ‘Every minute of every day I thought about you.’

  ‘Then why?’ he cried, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders. ‘Why did you go to him? I’ve been going out of my mind, thinking of all the things you might be doing together.’ He clasped her to him. ‘But I deserved it, didn’t I? After what I did to you.’

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ she said. ‘It’s over now. We’re together again and that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ he said, pulling her hands to his mouth and kissing them. ‘I’ve got so much to make up to you. You’re so beautiful, so innocent, and I exploited you in ways you don’t understand; ways I don’t even understand myself. It’ll never happen again, Madeleine. Never! I know now that you’re all I want in my life. You’re everything to me, more than everything, you’re my whole life.’

  ‘Then why did you do it? I know it was for the book, but . . .’

  ‘It’s so difficult to explain, my darling, and I hoped I would never have to, but you see Shamir . . .’

  At the mention of her friend’s name Madeleine blanched, but as she turned away he pulled her back to look at him. ‘You have to let me tell you, Maddy, you have to know what she’s really like. I know it will be painful, but you must face it.’

  He allowed her a few moments to collect herself, holding her against him and kissing her hair. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked gently, when her hand finally reached out for his.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘OK. Well, she came to me first when you were in Morocco, doing the sun tan commercial. She said she was in love with me and that I was wasting my time with you. Naturally, I told her to get out. She went, but then she came back again the following day. It was pitiful to see her, to see the way she begged me, on her hands and knees, to make love to her, but even though I pitied her, I despised her. In the end I picked her up and threw her bodily into the street, telling her that if she pulled a stunt like that again, I’d let you know just what sort of a best friend you had.

  ‘That was it for several weeks. She flew back to Los Angeles and we didn’t see her again until we went there ourselves. There was nothing she could do with you under the same roof, thank God, but the day you went for your audition, the day Roy found us in the pool together . . . Well, she’d told me she was going shopping, so, left to entertain myself, I decided to take a swim. I’d only been in the pool a few minutes when she walked out of the house, holding a knife. She said if I didn’t make love to her she’d . . . well, she’d do certain things to my anatomy. I thought she was kidding me at first, but then she dived into the pool and started to swim after me. Even then I thought it was some kind of game. It was only when she held the knife to my throat and ordered me to kiss her that I realised she was serious – that she really would use the knife if I didn’t do as she said. So I kissed her, pulling her under the water at the same time, until I managed to break free and swim to the other end of the pool. It was then, thank God, that Roy came back, otherwise God only knows what sort of mess I’d be in now.

  ‘I toyed with the idea of telling you at the time, but it all seemed so far-fetched that I could hardly believe it had happened myself. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I knew that, bizarre and horrible though it was, I would have to write about it. The only problem was, there was no conclusion, and having the perverse mind of a writer, I wanted one that was as sensational and lurid as possible. Naturally it occurred to me that I should make her the victim of the “murder” I need for the end of the book, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem of how to end the particular sequence she was actually involved in. I lay awake night after night, trying to think of how to do it, but all the time it kept coming back to the same thing – I had to live out the fiction of you discovering. It had to become a reality, and . . . well . . . the rest you know.’

  Madeleine shivered. ‘I had no idea all that was going on . . . What a bitch, and she called herself my best friend. But you should have t
old me, you could still have done what you did in the south of France, I would have acted it all for you . . .’ She stopped as he started to shake his head.

  ‘Yes, you could have,’ he said, ‘and God knows, I wish I had told you now, but at the time I was hell-bent on making it authentic. I’d thought it all through, and I’d already written what had happened up to the point of my speech on the terrace . . . I’d even written the conversation we’d had before dinner. Can you see now, Maddy, why I was asking you to trust me? I knew what I was going to do, and I was trying as hard as I could, without actually saying the words, to warn you. I thought I’d succeeded, but . . .’ he gave a dry laugh ‘. . . I know now that I’d failed, miserably. Oh God, if only we could go back to that night, I’d never have done it if I’d known what was going to happen afterwards.’

  ‘Do you mean the fight you had with Shamir?’

  ‘Good God, no. That was nothing. I mean this, us sitting here, trying to repair the damage I’ve done. But God help me, I wanted to kill Shamir that night. She flew at me like a wild cat, accusing me of wanting to destroy her friendship with you, saying that I’d always been jealous of it, and . . . oh, I don’t know, I can hardly remember now what she did say, but what incensed me was the way she made me out to be the villain of the piece when all the time she was the one who drove me to it.’

  ‘So you didn’t ever make love to her?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’ He looked at her. ‘And what about you?’ he said. ‘Did you and Enrico . . .?’

  Madeleine smiled. ‘No. But we did spend a night together. He just held me and comforted me and told me a story, would you believe? It was really nice.’

  ‘But he didn’t make love to you?’

  ‘He couldn’t,’ she answered. ‘His wife had only just died, he was still too unhappy. Do you know, next to you he’s the most wonderful man in the world.’

  Abruptly he let her go and sat forward, burying his face in his hands. ‘Does that mean you would have let him? If his wife hadn’t . . .’

  ‘No! No!’ She was quick to lie, afraid his jealousy would mar their reunion. ‘I couldn’t make love with another man, you know that, Paul.’

  ‘Do I?’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Maddy, I love you so much I can’t believe a man could hold you and not want you.’

  ‘But that’s what happened.’

  ‘Do you swear it?’

  ‘Yes, I swear it,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re not in love with him?’

  ‘How can I be? I’m in love with you.’

  ‘But the press, they were hinting at a romance between you.’

  ‘You know what the press are like. They’ll twist anything to make it into a sensation or a scandal.’

  His eyes shot to hers, hard and serious for a moment. Then he smiled. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, and scooping her back into his arms, he kissed her.

  It was a quarter to seven in the morning. Stephanie was alone in the downstairs office, looking at Woody’s rough schedule for Italy, but she was finding it difficult to concentrate. She’d had little sleep the night before, but that wasn’t unusual, she’d hardly slept at all these past few weeks. She just couldn’t understand how swiftly and radically the situation with Matthew and Marian had changed; her jealousy of Marian before they went to New York was nothing compared to the way she felt now. Things were so bad, in fact, that she feared she was in danger of letting her emotions get in the way of her professional decisions, which was something she simply couldn’t afford to let happen. Because, if Matthew really was going to leave her for Marian, her career would be the only thing left to her. She closed her eyes as a wave of desperation seemed to reach into every corner of her body. Please, she prayed silently, just let me get to the end of this film. Don’t let him tell me it’s over yet, I couldn’t handle it, not seeing him every day when there’s still such a long way to go. Afterwards – afterwards I will deal with it. And then, as if it were calling her a liar, her heart discharged a flood of pain through her chest that very nearly took her breath away. Oh Matthew, she cried silently, what is happening to us? Why have we come so far only for this to happen?

  Mentally, she shook herself, and forced her eyes back to the schedule in front of her, but she smiled sadly as she saw Matthew’s handwriting at the bottom of the page. Abruptly she put the schedule down and turned away.

  Hazel’s mirror was propped up on the bookshelf beside her desk, and in the grey early-morning light, Stephanie looked at herself. ‘God, I’m even beginning to look my age,’ she said, smoothing her fingers over the lines round her eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t agree with that.’

  She spun round and her heart lurched savagely as she saw Matthew standing at the door. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she said, trying to ignore the chaotic pulsing of blood through her veins.

  ‘Too busy talking to yourself,’ he grinned.

  Unable to bear his smile, she looked at her watch. ‘Shouldn’t you be on location?’

  He nodded. ‘They’re still setting up,’ he answered, walking across the office towards her. ‘I called you this morning but you must have left. I thought you might be on the set when I got there, but when you weren’t I guessed I might find you here.’

  He was standing so close that she could smell the cool air he had brought in with him, and she put her hands in her pockets because the urge to touch him was so strong. ‘Is there something you want to discuss?’ she said nonchalantly.

  ‘You know there is.’

  She started to turn away, but he stopped her and pulled her back to face him. ‘What is it, Stephanie? Why are you running away from me?’

  ‘You have to ask?’ Her voice was husky and he could see how close she was to tears.

  He let her go. ‘No,’ he answered wearily. ‘I don’t have to ask. What I have to do is explain. The trouble is, where to begin? How to put it into words.’

  She closed her eyes, steeling herself. He’s going to tell me now . . . He’s going to say . . .

  ‘Oh no!’ he groaned.

  She looked up, then following the direction of his eyes, she saw Marian crossing the street. I’ve got to get out of here, she panicked. I can’t see the two of them together, not right now.

  ‘Stephanie!’ he cried, as she ran past him. He caught her at the door, just as Marian was coming through.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marian mumbled when she saw them standing together at the foot of the stairs. ‘Uh, I said I’d come in early today, but I can . . .’ She started to turn back.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘Stephanie and I were just . . . Stephanie!’ But she had wrenched herself from his grip and was running up the stairs. Helplessly, he watched her go, then swore under his breath as the door slammed behind her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marian said again. ‘If I’d known . . . I mean, I wasn’t expecting to find anyone here.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault, it’s mine. I’d better go after her.’

  ‘No!’

  Startled by the emphatic note in Marian’s voice, he turned back.

  ‘No,’ she said, more calmly. ‘I’ll talk to her. You’ve tried before, and got nowhere. Now it’s my turn. I know I can’t tell her what we know about Olivia, but that’s what’s causing all this. She doesn’t know what on earth is going on, why we stop talking whenever she comes into the room, why you come almost everywhere with me . . .’

  ‘So how are you going to explain it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but let’s just hope I make a better job of it than you.’

  ‘You’re quite a lady, Marian Deacon.’ He had started to smile, but then his face became serious, and drawing her from the narrow passageway into the office, he said, ‘You don’t have to do this, you know. We both know the way you . . . the way . . .’

  ‘Do you mean, the way I feel about you? Well, Stephanie’s always known that, but as long as you don’t return the feelings there’s nothing to feel guilty
about, is there?’

  Letting her hand go, Matthew pushed his fingers through his hair and turned away. ‘You know that’s not true.’

  ‘Do I? I don’t know what to think, Matthew.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘Neither do I,’ he said quietly. ‘All I know is that I’m going through hell right now, and it’s as much because of you as because of Stephanie, so there’s plenty to feel guilty about. But it can’t be sorted out until this film is over. We’re all too tired and too damned confused.

  Then, to her amazement, he cupped his hands round her face, pulled her mouth to his and kissed her gently. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that ever since New York,’ he said, ‘but I shouldn’t have done it, and now . . .’ he pushed her away ‘. . . I’m going to the set because this morning I don’t seem to have much control over myself and God knows I want to do it again.’ And before she could stop him he had walked out of the door.

  It was hard for her to register exactly what she was feeling as she walked up the stairs to Stephanie’s office. Part of her was so ecstatically happy that she wanted to rush out and do something rash, like sing in the street or dance on a bus, but another part of her felt as though she was the only one of the three of them in control, the only one who could make decisions, say what had to be said. It was strange to harbour such opposite feelings, and she couldn’t even begin to make sense of it.

  She tapped softly on Stephanie’s door, and when Stephanie didn’t answer she was tempted to go away. But her resolve was firm; she turned the handle and pushed the door open.

  Stephanie was standing at the window, gazing sight-lessly out at the buildings opposite. Her arms were folded, and though Marian didn’t think she’d been crying, her face reflected the pain she was suffering.

  ‘Stephanie,’ she said. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘Would you?’ Stephanie said, still looking out of the window.

  Marian came further into the room and closed the door behind her. ‘I think we should talk, don’t you?’

  Slowly Stephanie turned to face her. ‘And what should we talk about, Marian?’