‘In fact it will probably be easier to maintain the fiction that this is a happy, loving marriage that way. I don’t know about you,’ he said with irony, ‘but I am starting to feel like an actor in a very bad farce.’
‘Bryn…’
‘On the other hand, there’s one way we could end all this. I’m talking about a time-honoured way that has worked for us before. If you recall.’
Fleur bit her lip but also discovered his words were like a hail of bullets tearing into her heart. Nor did he stop there.
‘Last night I even wondered if I should try the…are you lonesome tonight, Mrs Wallis? routine. Then I thought that you were probably back in your ivory tower and sleeping the sleep of the just and the…righteous,’ he finished softly but lethally.
Tears pricked her eyes. ‘I never claimed to be either,’ she said huskily.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you had it all worked out to the last letter? In fact, I thought there might be only one reason why you hadn’t walked out already.’
‘There was,’ she said, still battling tears but refusing to give in to them.
‘May I set your mind to rest, then? Your stalker has been identified.’
Fleur’s mouth fell open. ‘How?’ she whispered. ‘Why?’
‘How?’ He grimaced. ‘Money. A private-detective agency, in other words. From your résumé which I still happened to have, they tracked back through your last two jobs. From the address of the job you had before last, they did a search of the florists in the area. They found several that still had records of delivering flowers to you but once he got careless and paid for them by credit card. The name matched the name of someone who worked for the same corporation you worked for.’ He told her the name.
Fleur sank down onto the end of one of the twin beds. ‘I never knew anyone of that name.’
‘All the same, that’s how he was able to trace your address and phone number. Then—who knows?—he may have got lucky just ringing around similar corporations and asking for you.’
Fleur shivered.
‘But you never have to worry about him again, Fleur,’ he said quietly. ‘Nor was it only you he stalked. He turned out to have a record of it, but in New Zealand—he was a Kiwi. He also suffered the…’ he gestured ‘…misfortune of losing his life a couple of months ago in a motorbike accident.’
She exhaled slowly then she said dazedly, ‘Why did you do that, Bryn?’
‘I thought it should be done. I didn’t anticipate being able to remove the fear of it quite like that but I was determined to make sure he never bothered you again.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered and sat in silence for a long moment as she digested it all, and found herself wondering if the real reason he’d done it was so that he could release her from their marriage with no guilt about her being stalked… ‘So now I’m free to go, in other words?’ she said and looked at him at last.
‘It would appear to be what you want.’
‘What will you tell Tom and Alana?’
‘Nothing at the moment,’ he said flatly. ‘Other than that you’re visiting your parents for the time being.’
For a moment she was tempted to tell him the truth. That it was for Tom’s sake that she’d stayed, not because she was afraid to leave him—she hadn’t even thought about it. That this visit to her parents had not been planned as an attempt to leave him but to give Tom and Alana some time alone. And yes, to give herself a bit of a break, she couldn’t deny, but also a chance to desperately think of a way round this impasse between them.
Yet now she had virtually been presented with no good reason to stay with him as he saw it, unless she was prepared to sleep with him again. And to gloss over again all the things she didn’t understand about him, all the things it hurt her not to know. The biggest bar of all, however, she thought sadly, was that he had never changed his mind about her.
‘Well, if you’re wondering whether I’ll fade away gracefully, Bryn, I will. I’d like to think there’d be no hard feelings because of Tom. But I don’t want any of your worldly possessions, so perhaps you could arrange—things?’
They stared into each other’s eyes and for a moment she remembered another time and place when he’d suggested she put up a fight… But almost immediately she knew she couldn’t.
‘That’s all?’ he said at last.
Only you can rectify this state of affairs, Bryn, she found herself wanting to tell him. But what was the good?
She stared down at her hands. ‘It’s been nice knowing you. It’s been a real education at times, too. Would you tell Alana I’ll go home this afternoon but I’ve got a headache, so I’m having a bit of a rest now?’
She heard the savage breath he took and tensed, not knowing what to expect. Then she heard the door open and close, and she was alone. That was when the tears came, and she stayed in her room for a couple of hours until she got the dreadful grief she felt under control. She also packed. When she did leave her room it was to find, courtesy of the housekeeper, that Alana had taken Tom for a ride on the Rivercat, which he adored. That Walter Wallis had been chauffeured to his physiotherapist and that Bryn wasn’t expected home for dinner.
It was now or never, she thought. But she sat down and wrote Tom a note, reminding him that she was going to stay with her parents. She drew a funny picture of a mother goose wearing a bow around her neck, and a father goose with a collar and tie, both huddled anxiously around a gosling called Fleur. ‘Stay cool, dude!’ she wrote, and… ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t!’
But although she rang her parents, and spoke at length to her father, it wasn’t to her parents’ home that she went when she left the Wallis mansion in a taxi.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE spent two days in a hotel, slept a lot, then she flew up the coast and took a ferry to Hedge Island.
The first thing Fleur noticed when the ferry came in was that the Julene was not on its mooring.
Discreet enquiries of the ferry captain provided the information that Eric and Julene had gone away for a couple of days on it; he’d spoken to them on the radio.
She breathed a sigh of relief at not having to explain things to them or beg them not to get in touch with Bryn. She had no doubt that Bryn would not dream she’d come back to Clam Cove, and no fear that he himself would come to Clam Cove in the next few days. She knew his father wasn’t capable of travelling yet, apart from anything else.
So she hired a Moke and drove over the island, to find the gates shut and padlocked, and a notice on them that the restaurant was closed for the summer.
But she hadn’t spent three months at Clam Cove without discovering certain things. Like the way round the fence line she’d come across on one of her rambles, and where all the spare keys were hidden. There was virtually no crime on the island anyway, so few people bothered to lock up at all—Eric and Julene would have had no fear of leaving the place for a few days. And she was able to drive the Moke in and relock the gates.
But as she wandered past the restaurant and onto the beach she asked herself why she had come. Ostensibly to collect her things but someone else could have packed them up for her. No, she thought, it had been like a siren call to her soul to see Clam Cove one last time. It was as if only by doing this could she find the answer to why things had gone so badly wrong. It was the knowledge that without this answer she’d never have any peace of mind again.
But as the breeze lifted her hair and she looked around at the palm trees, the headlands, the sheen of sunlight on the sea, as she smelt the salty tang in the air and heard the murmur of the waves on the reef and the high, free whistle of a fish hawk, she thought she may have miscalculated. Because the memories held captive here at Clam Cove might be more than she could bear…
Bryn was everywhere. It was impossible to look at the restaurant, now so quiet and idle, without seeing him in his bandanna and pirate shirt, on the good nights when he was charming everyone witless, or the bad nights when you felt like throwing a glass of w
ine over him and had done so…
How could you forget Bryn and Tom conducting long serious conversations as the little boy fetched and carried for Bryn while he was woodworking, then breaking out into laughter and song?
It was impossible not to be reminded of his compassion and his humour, all the things that he felt so deeply about and some of the impossible situations he got himself into. She was standing on the spot where they had once laid a dance floor on the beach, and that night came back to her vividly. So typically Bryn, she thought, to pour cream, raspberries and wine over a man then end up trying to make amends because he’d insulted him in front of his wife, but of course there was so much more to remember about that night…
In fact, she crossed her arms protectively over her body as it all flooded back, trying to ease the pain as she wondered why she’d done what she’d done—left him.
Then, after an age, she forced herself to walk up the steps to the veranda of the main bungalow and another memory came back to her. Of a man in the grip of a nightmare that he couldn’t even begin to tell her about. And she knew, for better or worse—she wasn’t sure which, but all the same—why she’d done it. She just wasn’t built to accept half a loaf from the man she loved… Otherwise she would have persevered, she thought with tears streaming down her cheeks. And she just wasn’t built to be held in suspicion because of what had happened to his sister or because she turned heads.
It gave her some relief to think this, not that she hadn’t thought it before, but it presented itself to her back at Clam Cove as the philosophy she should adopt to help her over the worst of leaving Bryn. It even had a name, she reflected. Go and catch a falling star…Whether any other woman would ever catch the falling star that was Bryn Wallis, she didn’t know, but she hadn’t been able to. How did you catch a falling star anyway?
The next morning—she’d spent the night on Julene’s new couch—she finished her packing. Some of it would have to be sent on, including her piano, of course, but a lot she could take with her. Especially if she left her new clothes behind. It sent a tremor through her to think of discarding another set of clothes because of a man and she suddenly knew she couldn’t do it.
So she packed each item, some of them that they’d bought together, some she’d worn in the most intimate circumstances with him, carefully.
Then it was all done and she decided to go for a last swim at Clam Cove. It was a glorious day. Hot, clear and incredibly peaceful with only the sound of the birds and cicadas shrilling in the bush, the lap of the water to be heard.
She spent half an hour in the sea, swimming then floating on her back with her eyes closed and wondering how she was going to force herself to leave. When she came out she dried herself off and wrapped the sarong Julene had given her over her bikini. But she stood on the beach for an age before she could tear herself away.
She didn’t see Bryn until she was almost upon him. He was sitting on the restaurant steps and it was as he stood up that she raised her eyes from the path—and stopped as if she’d been shot. He wore khaki trousers, a check shirt and deck shoes. She looked around wildly, to see another Moke parked beside hers.
‘Hello, Fleur,’ he said quietly.
‘But…but…Tom…your father,’ she stammered incoherently. ‘How could you leave them? Why are you here? I thought I was safe…’
He closed his eyes briefly. ‘I knew you were here.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ she protested. ‘I didn’t even tell my father. I just said I was going away for a couple of days. And Eric and Julene aren’t—’
‘No one told me, Fleur. I…sensed it.’
Her eyes were huge suddenly. ‘How?’ she asked hoarsely.
He smiled drily. ‘It was where I most wanted to be and I just had the…intuition that it was because you were here.’
‘Bryn, what are you saying?’ she whispered with her heart starting to pound.
‘That it took losing you to…bring me to my senses,’ he said sombrely.
‘But I can’t…I can’t go through all that again.’ She put a hand to her heart and her eyes were stricken. ‘I’ve broken all the ties, I’ve—’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ he interjected. ‘I just wanted you to know why I was the way I was. Look, I’ve brewed some coffee. Could we…talk?’
They sat on the veranda under an umbrella.
He poured the coffee. ‘There’s so much to say, I don’t know where to start, but perhaps the accident on the Julene will explain some of it.’
Fleur blinked.
‘I hate hospitals.’ He grimaced. ‘They’re probably not places you’re supposed to enjoy but my memories of them are especially horrific. I had a friend and colleague killed in a land-mine accident. They tried their hardest to save him but the facilities were primitive. Even so, all hospitals have certain similarities. Losing him in any accident would have been bad enough but the horror and the futility of that—well, hospitals will always bring it back to me.’
She gazed at him with her lips parted, then collected herself. ‘My father told me—he read about it. And Eric…suggested you might be having nightmares about it again.’
‘What else did Eric tell you?’
‘Just that he’d been there too… Is that why you discharged yourself so soon?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you couldn’t tell me at the time, Bryn?’
He fiddled with his spoon and she noticed the lines scored harshly beside his mouth. ‘Fleur—and I’ve never told anyone this—that awful accident was why I came to Clam Cove in the first place. Yes, Alana and Tom fitted in with it. But it was the only way I could deal with the guilt I felt.’ He looked up abruptly. ‘If I hadn’t been so determined to get that story, it mightn’t have happened.’
She drew in a shaky breath. ‘Oh, Bryn. And you’ve been living with it ever since?’
‘Not only that but the feeling of being…cauterized. As if all the things I saw had closed off any finer feelings I possessed. I truly, for example, did not believe I could fall in love properly—until you came into my life. I didn’t believe I had any real emotional depths left—except for Tom—and I was happy to be that way.’
He looked around then continued very quietly. ‘That it should be you to bring me out of it, a girl who reminded me of my sister and her downfall, a girl who would always turn heads, was the added irony of it and it undoubtedly added to my cynicism. That’s why I fought falling in love with you, Fleur. Or, it was one of the reasons.’
‘What others were there?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve told you about Alana. But, even after I’d acknowledged what was happening to me, something you yourself said stayed with me. Something about the one person you can never get out of your heart whether they deserve to be there or not. When you believed Tom was my son you thought it was Tom’s mother I had in my heart. Ever since I’ve wondered how true it was for you, though, to say it in any context.’
‘Bryn—’
But he put a hand over hers. ‘That’s why I hated the thought of you wearing clothes he may have bought, or ones that brought back memories of him. And even when I discovered that they weren’t, I had to grapple with the fact that your break-up with him, a man whose name I don’t even know, was so traumatic, you couldn’t bear to be reminded of it. That’s when I began to suspect I would only feel safe here at Clam Cove with you.’
She was silent.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if it makes any sense to you or if you even want to hear the rest?’
‘Tell me,’ she said barely audibly.
‘If I gave you cause to believe I married you because Tom needed a mother, what actually happened was, I couldn’t bear to think of you being lonely and frightened and I used any tool I could think of to get you to agree. The one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do was admit that I was back in touch with my emotions—and as scared as hell that I could get hurt because of it.’
She wiped her eyes with her knuckles a
nd sniffed.
‘Not only back in touch with my emotions,’ he went on, ‘but experiencing the one emotion that had eluded me even before I got all bitter and twisted.’ He smiled painfully. ‘In other words, I’d fallen deeply in love with a girl in a way that had never happened to me before. A girl, moreover, who was sworn off men.’
‘Oh, Bryn,’ she said, and her voice caught in her throat. ‘Yes, I had sworn off men but…’ She stopped helplessly.
His hand tightened over hers. ‘Tell me your side, Fleur. Please.’
She looked at him for a long time with all sorts of emotions chasing through her eyes, which were, he thought, as blue as the ocean, while her hair had dried to a tangle of fairness.
She cleared her throat at last. ‘Every way I turned, I seemed to come up with a whole lot of reasons for you to marry me but not the right one. Because I was being stalked—it seemed to me you even went out of your way to solve that problem so you could set me free with no guilt when the time came.’
‘No, I didn’t, Fleur,’ he denied. ‘I did it for two reasons. Because no one should have to live with that kind of fear or feel dependent on a “protector” forever. And because it goes against the grain with me to turn a blind eye to that kind of obsession or perversion.’ He paused, and looked out to sea. ‘The strange thing is, I thought that was why you married me.’
She swallowed as his gaze came back to her, and he smiled, a very faint echo of the old Bryn. ‘But I didn’t want you to feel grateful to me, in other words. I wanted there to be only one reason for you to be with me.’
It trembled on her lips to tell him his ego was showing but there were still shadows on her mind.
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘I…’
‘Tom,’ he broke in gently, ‘is going to be fine. And a lot of it is thanks to you. He accepted your departure quite equitably, not that he knew it was intended to be permanent. But he told Alana you needed to be with your mum for a while. And he told her that, at the same time, he was rather happy to have his very own mum because he was starting to like her very much but it had also been getting complicated at school, explaining to his friends who we all were.’
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