The Society Wife

by India Grey

  The voice of the social worker cut through his thoughts. She was looking at him steadily. ‘What sort of childhood did you have?’

  Tristan gave her a bland smile. ‘Very privileged. I grew up in a big house with servants and a swimming pool. We were very lucky.’

  ‘We? Who’s we, Mr Romero? You and your brothers and sisters?’

  Tristan felt the smile die on his lips, but kept it there with some effort. ‘Me and my…brother.’

  ‘Just one?’

  Lily came out of the house carrying a tray. She was wearing a simple white blouse with little cap sleeves and a short cotton skirt strewn with daisies that made her look fresh and pure and sweet. Tristan felt his heart lurch.

  He had to do this for her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, tersely. ‘Just one. Nico. He’s ten years younger than me. He works in a charity based in Madrid.’

  Miss Squires was writing everything down, and Tristan was glad that her eyes were directed at the paper in front of her rather than at him.

  ‘Not in the bank?’

  ‘No.’ Tristan had made sure of that. He’d sacrificed finishing his degree and doing something he wanted in life to make sure of that.

  ‘What about your parents?’ Miss Squires said, clearly deciding that Nico was of little interest. ‘Are you close to them?’

  Across the table Lily’s eyes met his. They were soft and sunlight dappled, and they reached out to him. Looking into them, holding on, he said tonelessly, ‘I see them quite often. I work alongside my father.’

  Miss Squires looked up. ‘That’s not really what I’m asking.’

  Gently Lily placed a pale blue pottery mug of tea in front of him. Tristan rubbed his fingers wearily across his eyes. ‘Why do you want to know this?

  ‘This is the next part of the process, Mr Romero,’ said Miss Squires slightly archly. ‘I think you’ve done the basic induction days, where you’ve heard a bit about some of the issues faced by the children in the adoption system?’

  Tristan tried to keep the grimace from his face as he remembered the three grim Saturdays spent in a community centre in North London being told about the physical effects on babies born to mothers addicted to drugs or alcohol, the mental effects of neglect, violence or abuse.

  Areas he was pretty much expert in already. At times he had felt like getting up and giving the talk himself.

  ‘Well,’ the social worker continued, with a small shake of her head at Lily’s offer of sugar, ‘this is the time when we find out more about you. About what kind of person you are, which will help us match you to a child. We feel that the experiences people had when they were children play a crucial role in defining what kind of parents they’ll end up becoming.’

  No kidding.

  ‘It’s important to be as honest as you can—things have a habit of coming out further down the line anyway. Were you close to your mother, would you say?’

  This must be how it feels to stand on the gallows, thought Tristan bleakly. This realisation that there’s no longer any possibility of running or hiding. ‘Not really,’ he said stiffly. ‘My mother’s only close relationship is with alcohol, and I was sent to boarding school in England when I was eight.’

  Behind her glasses the social worker blinked. ‘How did you feel about that?’

  ‘Absolutely delighted.’

  Miss Squires looked deeply shocked, as if he’d just admitted to a fondness for tor turing kittens. ‘Really? So you’re in favour of sending children away to be educated in impersonal institutions, away from the family?’

  He met her eyes steadily. ‘Yes, if the family is like mine was.’

  Beneath the table Lily found his hand and took it in hers. The sunlight filtering through the cherry tree made her hair shimmer and turned her skin to honeyed gold. For a moment there was no sound apart from birdsong and the distant drone of an aeroplane in the cornflower-blue sky above.

  ‘Could you explain that a bit more?’

  Dios, was she never going to give up? Panic was beginning to close in on him, like a cloth coming down over his face, making it difficult to breathe, difficult to think. The tranquil garden with the cherry tree and the sound of birds seemed suddenly unreal, insubstantial and all he could see was the darkness inside himself.

  Lily’s hand was the only thing an choring him to reality. He felt her fingers tighten around his as the darkness sucked him down.

  He laughed, and even to his own ears it was a horrible, harsh sound. ‘My father is the eleventh Duke of Tarraco, and a direct descendent of one of the first familiares—collaborators of the Spanish Inquisition. That should tell you something. My family rose to prominence and gained wealth and favour from the royal court thanks to their fondness for the rack and the thumbscrew. Cruelty is a family trait.’

  ‘Are you saying that your father was cruel to you, Mr Romero?’ Miss Squires persisted.

  ‘Of course not,’ Tristan replied with deep, drawling irony. ‘It wasn’t cruelty. No—every blow, every lash of the belt, every stroke of the whip was for our own good. He wasn’t being cruel to us, he was simply doing his duty, forging us into proper Romero men, making sure he passed on the legacy of violence and brutality to us, just as his father had passed it on to him.’

  Lily’s hand. Holding his. Keeping him from the edge. A part of his mind stayed fixed on that while he continued, almost conversationally, ‘The Banco Romero was initially founded to process the money confiscated from victims of the Inquisition. In fact,’ he drawled coldly, ‘my family now own a set of priceless jewels that once belonged to someone that one of our distinguished ancestors had executed for heresy.’

  Lily’s face was pale, stricken, reflecting all the suffering he had taught himself not to show.

  ‘The Romero jewels,’ she whispered.

  Tristan’s smile was glacial. ‘Exactly. A symbol of our corruption and guilt.’

  ‘That’s why you didn’t want me to have them?’

  Adrenaline was coursing through him and the chasm gaped before him, dark and deep and full of horror. He had to stay strong to stop himself slipping down into it. Pulling his hand from hers he shrugged. ‘Yes. And because I can’t look at them without remembering the night when my father ripped the earrings out of my mother’s ears for some comment that she’d made over dinner that he considered disrespectful. So you see, it wasn’t only me and my brothers who bore the brunt of it…’

  His throat constricted suddenly, cutting off the terrible litany of memories, and Tristan brought his fist up to his forehead in a jerky, helpless movement. Lily had shifted forwards to the edge of her seat so that she was facing him, both her hands folded around his.

  ‘Brothers?’ Miss Squires enquired. Tristan felt his blood turn to ice as she glanced down at the paper she’d been writing on. ‘I thought you only had one?’

  He had to hand it to her, Tristan thought dully, dropping his head into his hands for a moment. She’d said that the truth had a habit of coming out. He lifted his head and looked straight at the social worker with a bitter smile.

  ‘I do now. But once there were three of us. My older brother, Emilio was the true Romero heir. It should have been he who inherited the title and the position in the company.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Lily asked in a whisper.

  ‘He killed himself the day before his twenty-first birthday.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘HE COULDN’T take it any more, you see. The pressure of being the Romero heir and the position in the bank, so he—’

  Tristan’s voice sounded as if he had swal lowed broken glass. Numb with horror, Lily stumbled to her feet so that her chair fell backwards. ‘Tristan, stop!’ she said in a low wail of anguish, going to stand behind him and sliding her arms around his shoulders, trying to hold all of him. ‘Please, stop now…you don’t have to say any more.’

  Across the table Miss Squires averted her eyes and wrote more notes.

  In her arms Tristan’s body felt utterly r
igid, utterly unyielding, as if she were holding a block of stone. And then very slowly he unpeeled her arms from around him and got stiffly to his feet. Standing behind him, Lily couldn’t see his face, but his voice was like black ice.

  ‘Sorry.’

  The tense little silence that followed was broken by the ring of a mobile phone, which made them all start. Tristan stooped to take it from the pocket of his jacket that hung on the back of the chair. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, but this time all trace of emotion had left his voice and the word was perfectly bland. ‘I have to take this.’ Slipping out from the table, he walked away into the house.

  Miss Squires was gathering together her sheets of paper and tucking them into a folder. ‘Well, I think we’ll leave it there for today,’ she said, tucking the folder back in her recycled hessian bag and carefully not meeting Lily’s eye. For a moment Lily almost hated her for making Tristan talk about those things. But she hated herself more. She had made him do this.

  They got up and went through the kitchen and into the hallway. It was cool in here, and, after the sunlit garden, very dim. Tristan’s voice drifted down the stairs, strong, staccato, decisive. At the door Miss Squires turned to Lily with a rather forced smile. ‘Thank you for the tea, Mrs Romero, and I’ll be in touch about our next meeting.’ She paused. ‘If you and your husband decide to proceed, that is.’

  Outside Lily gathered up the mugs and the plate of biscuits she had laid out with such high hopes and such meticulous care. How foolish it seemed now that she had thought that biscuits and the kind of skirt she wore were important when all the time she hadn’t known anything about what really mattered. She carried the tray into the kitchen and set it down beside the salmon. The carefully chosen, stage managed salmon that had played its part to perfection, and which Miss Squires hadn’t even seemed to notice. She looked up as Tristan appeared in the doorway.

  ‘I have to go.’

  She froze, and the apology she had been about to deliver died on her lips. There was something terrifyingly bleak about the way he spoke. Something final that invited no further discussion. His face had a waxen quality about it and his lips were white.

  ‘Tristan, what is it? What’s happened?’

  He shook his head quickly, backing away from her with his hands held in front of him, as if he wanted to hold her off him.

  ‘An emergency. Dimitri is waiting outside. I’m sorry, I have to leave immediately.’ He turned, running a hand through his hair distractedly as he looked around before moving into the hallway. ‘It’s probably for the best, anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He shrugged, terrifying in his bleak ness. ‘I’ve ruined it for you.’

  ‘No,’ Lily said fiercely. ‘I should never have asked you to do this. It was stupid and selfish.’ She bit her lip, struggling to keep the anguish and the pain from her voice. ‘You even tried to say no, and then I made you change your mind.’

  He gave a harsh laugh. One hand was on the open door, the knuckles gleaming like pearls. ‘After…the baby, how could I not? How could I not help?’

  Duty. That was what had made him do this for her.

  Of course.

  She remembered the look on his face just after they’d made love, just before he’d agreed to do it. The look of a man who was enduring torment.

  People said that when you were stabbed you didn’t feel the pain at first. That there was a strange numb sensation of tingling heat before the pain kicked in. Lily knew that she had to speak while she still could. Before the pain started and she couldn’t do anything. On the street beyond the gate his long black car crouched menacingly, Dimitri’s expressionless face just visible through the glass. Fixing her eyes on it, Lily said hoarsely, ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He hesitated, head bent, looking as if there was something else he wanted to say. Lily waited, her breath burning in her chest, her torn heart still as he lifted his head and gave her a twisted, heartbreaking smile.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and walked away.

  He didn’t look back, didn’t turn his head as the car pulled away. Because if he had he might have told Dimitri to stop and he would have got out and gone back to her. He imagined running back up the path towards her and snatching her up in his arms and kissing her hard enough to tell her what he didn’t have the words to say.

  No, it wasn’t that he didn’t have the words. He knew exactly what words he wanted to say, but the Romero curse of duty and honour made it impossible to say them because he knew that telling Lily Alexander that he loved her would be a singularly selfish act. What could he offer her? Tainted wealth and a heart so damaged and twisted it was barely recognisable as human. Nothing that she wanted or needed. He thought of what Tom had said all those months ago at Stowell, about her needing someone nice and steady. Someone who could help her fulfil her dream of becoming a mother, not stand in the way of it.

  Feeling infinitely weary, he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead until they had left the narrow network of streets around Lily’s house, the restaurant where he’d once kissed her for the benefit of a photographer he’d spotted lurking in a car parked further up the street, the stretch of open ground on Primrose Hill where they’d walked sometimes, holding hands. He smiled ruefully to himself. In these last few months he’d really learned to love the paparazzi.

  When they reached the wide, impersonal road around Regent’s Park he turned to Dimitri, making a huge effort to turn outwards from his own tragedy to the wider suffering.

  ‘So how bad is it?’

  Behind his glasses Dimitri’s face was grey. ‘Earthquake was six point eight on Richter Scale. Epicentre about thirty kilometers to the north of the village.’

  Tristan’s mind raced. Below seven on the Richter scale. That was encouraging. He turned his head and gazed unseeingly out of the window where it was business as usual in London. People were going about life oblivious to the disaster on the other side of the world, the smaller one a few miles away in Primrose Hill.

  ‘The health centre?’

  ‘Some damage, but still standing.’

  He nodded, briefly. Khazakismir lay a little to the north of the East Anatolian fault, and Tristan had ensured that the health centre was built to the latest earthquake construction standards. Unlike most of the other buildings in the village.

  ‘Irina?’

  ‘I do not know…’ Dimitri’s voice cracked. ‘The house is gone. They have not found her yet. Or the twins. We just have to hope.’

  ‘Yes. There’s always hope,’ lied Tristan.

  The bright morning had faded into a dull afternoon and a wind had sprung up. It whipped the polka-dotted cloth off the table in the garden and hurled it across the lawn.

  Lily was cold. So cold that she couldn’t remember what it had felt like to be warm. In the hours since Tristan had left she had been pacing around the house, numbly going about the business of sorting, ordering, tidying away, almost as if she were getting ready to leave. Going upstairs to get a jumper, she saw the ivory satin dress that Tristan had bought her hanging in the wardrobe, and she finally gave way to tears.

  It was over. The last infinitely fine silken thread that had tied her to Tristan had been severed and he had gone, leaving her in the ruins of a life with which she felt no connection. All the things she’d wanted, all the dreams she had spent so many years building in her head had crumbled into ashes and dust the moment she had tried to grasp hold of them.

  As the clouds gathered and blackened outside she moved through the house like a sleepwalker, shivering, picking things up and putting them back in different places, tears falling erratically and unheeded as she tidied up the loose ends from which she had hoped to make a life. She found the estate agent’s brochure on Dolphin House, with its glossy photographs of the huge sun-filled kitchen, the master bedroom, the view from the beautiful landing window over the garden to the sea, and remembered how she had imagined living there, with the children she was
going to make hers. She had told Miss Squires over the phone that she would be open to taking any child, no matter what its background or problems, because she had believed there was no damage that couldn’t be overcome with love.

  But she had been wrong.

  She had loved Tristan, and she hadn’t been able to reach him at all. She had never managed to break through the shell of duty and obligation and touch the damaged heart beneath. Instead she had just become another one of the people for whom he felt responsible.

  Duty, not love. That was what had bound him to her. He had told her that he was incapable of love, incapable of any emotion, but on some level she had thought she could change that.

  Fix him.

  She wiped her sleeve impatiently across one wet cheek. How was it possible to be so arrogant and at the same time so naïve? She hadn’t even tried to find out what had made him like that in the first place—into the kind of man who didn’t show a flicker of emotion when his own child died.

  In the kitchen the salmon fixed her with its baleful, accusing eye. What difference would it have made if you knew? it seemed to say. He just didn’t love you and he didn’t want the baby. Nothing could have changed that.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said out loud, and, opening the back door in a gust of wind, she picked it up and put it outside for the little grey cat.

  The house seemed terrifyingly quiet. Pulling the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, she wandered through to the sitting room and switched on the television, finally stopping her pacing and sinking down into the embrace of the old velvet sofa and drawing her knees up to her chest. The screen in front of her was filled with the images of some distant disaster, of people sifting through the rubble of what had been houses with bare hands, grey with dust. The noise, condensed and filtered through the speakers of the television, was that of collective pain, and Lily recognised that the people she was watching were engaged in what she, in her own way, had spent the time doing since Tristan left. Trying to make order out of chaos. Hoping for some sign that it was worth carrying on.