It was likely to be sooner still, she discovered.
Some time later, when they were walking back and approaching her apartment block, Luke touched her elbow lightly, startling her, since he had been avoiding physical contact with her all day.
‘If you don’t mind, Maria, I’m going to telephone when we get in and find out if I can get a seat on an earlier flight back to Hong Kong—tonight, preferably,’ he added evenly. ‘It was a mistake for me to stay after Friday evening. We should have known we couldn’t prolong it once we’d agreed that it had to end.’
The light seemed to fade from the brightly shimmering early evening as she heard him, and her heart felt as if an iron band was tightening mercilessly about it.
‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ she agreed tonelessly.
There was nothing else she could say, no protest she could make. She knew it had to end. She had wanted it to.
But she had thought they would still have tonight.
Luke slanted her a sharp glance. ‘How badly have I messed up your life?’
Maria gave a dry little laugh as she clamped down on the obvious, defeatist answer.
‘It’s a question I still have to study,’ she offered evasively instead.
‘You’ll sort it out,’ he assured her callously as they entered the building, and she suppressed an urge to hit out at him and tell him exactly what he had done and was doing to her.
‘What about you?’ she responded in her most creamily civilised voice as he pushed one of the buttons on the panel outside the lifts.
‘I’II live with it,’ Luke answered somewhat grimly, waiting for her to precede him into an empty lift as the door slid open.
‘Hey, hold it, you two!’ a familiar voice hailed them from behind. ‘Wait for us!’
As Luke automatically put a finger to the button that prevented the door from closing, Maria tensed, turning to see Florian rushing towards them, towing Nicky along by the hand.
She glanced at Luke apprehensively, knowing that he was mature enough to control his dislike of Florian—but probably only as long as Florian refrained from being provocative; if he didn’t, and one never knew with Florian, Luke might say or do anything.
Another possibility occurred to her. If Florian or Nicky were to draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that she and Luke were returning to her apartment together, becoming aware of the affair Luke had wanted to keep secret, now when it was ironically no longer an affair——
Maria shivered and, moving closer to Luke to make room for the couple, she touched his wrist lightly with her fingers, unsure if the impulse to do so sprang from an urge to seek reassurance, or to give it.
Luke gave her a slightly surprised look before greeting Nicky and Florian, his manner urbane.
‘I wish you’d remember that I haven’t got a fast-forward button, Flo!’ Nicky was gasping, throwing Maria and Luke a quick apologetic glance and standing on one leg to examine an elegant leather shoe as the door closed. ‘I’m sure I’ve damaged a heel.’
Florian was clearly still floating effortlessly on Friday evening’s buoyant mood.
‘These women just can’t stand the pace, can they?’ he appealed to Luke cheerfully before inevitably focusing on his own concerns. ‘You’ve heard about this Hawaiian jaunt of mine, presumably?’
‘Maria was telling me,’ Luke conceded smoothly.
‘Yes, she——’
Florian broke off, looking astonished, and Maria knew him well enough to realise that his attention had made a rare leap outward.
Nicky too must have recognised the uncharacteristic gap in his self-absorption and wondered what was coming, because she rushed into speech.
‘He thinks he needs a whole new wardrobe for it,’ she giggled. ‘I keep telling him people can’t see him on the radio.’
But Florian wasn’t to be diverted.
‘Oh, hey, it’s just struck me!’ he claimed dramatically, beaming at Maria and Luke. ‘The two of you here together on a Sunday, and we met you arriving another time…Don’t tell me congratulations are due! They are, aren’t they? I bet I’m the first to realise! The two of you are…how does it go? An item! I just love that phrase—an item. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Maria was paralysed, waiting for some sort of explosion, or for Luke to deny that he was involved with someone like her—the truth, now.
‘Yes.’ Utterly expressionless, the word was addressed to Florian, and she clutched at Luke’s hand instinctively, still expecting something more.
Luke glanced at her briefly, but instead of the fury she was anticipating, his expression was complex, more questioning than anything else, and his fingers relaxed, curling themselves about her hand.
Florian was examining her perplexedly.
‘I’ve never got it, this thing about Maria and men—the way she attracts them,’’ he observed candidly.
‘All charm and flattery as usual, Flo,’ Maria commented sarcastically, having heard it before.
‘I know some of the other jocks here fancy her rotten, and it was the same story in Sydney,’ Florian told Luke crudely, genuinely unaware of the variety of reactions he was eliciting. ‘Oh, I suppose she’s not so bad really, but I honestly don’t get it.’
‘Florian, how can you be so rude?’ Nicky scolded him as if he were a misbehaving son. ‘Not to mention tactless. I’m ashamed of you!’
‘But I’m fascinated, Nicky,’ Luke asserted smoothly. ‘If he’s really so unique?’
Florian looked pleased, never averse to discussing his own idiosyncrasies which he quite sincerely believed to be endearingly quirky.
‘I am unique. But I suppose I’m prejudiced by my first sight of her, a passion-killer if ever there was one. I still see you like that, Maria. Straw boater and a pony-tail, that hideous school uniform hitched up around your thighs so you could show off your legs—God knows why you wanted to when they were covered in hockey bruises, clunky leather lace-ups and ankle socks covered in red dust!’ Florian stopped his theatrically narrow-eyed scrutiny of Maria and grinned at Luke, who must have been telling the truth because he was all attention, no less than riveted. ‘Do you wonder? She’d caught two buses across Johannesburg and then walked the last couple of miles to come and find me.’
‘To find out how it was done,’ Maria corrected him automatically.
‘To find out how it worked,’ Florian conceded graciously, but Luke was still the audience he was trying to impress. ‘The high school I was at was among the first to have a tiny in-school radio station, news, views, interviews and a touch of music, and consequently we’d attracted quite a bit of somewhat condescending attention from real stations around town. Maria was absolutely determined that her school wasn’t going to be left behind. I suppose you could say we sort of adopted each other, as neither of us had any real brothers and sisters. We’ve been together ever since, off and on, helping each other out. She even introduced me to my wife, but she knows she didn’t exactly do either me or Rachel a favour that time.’
Maria winced as Luke’s fingers tightened their hold on hers painfully. Appalled, she hardly dared look at him, afraid of the contempt she would have to face, because of course he would take Florian’s insouciant words as confirmation of everything he believed of her.
When she did look at him, she was shocked. Luke accepted it. He accepted that there had never been anything of a romantic or sexual nature between her and Florian.
She began to shake with rage as the lift reached the floor on which her apartment was situated. Luke could believe Florian, whom he disliked——
But he had never believed her.
CHAPTER TEN
MARIA was still shaking violently when she and Luke got out of the lift.
She snatched her hand away from his as if she feared he might contaminate her and stalked ahead of him, not trusting herself to speak until they were inside her apartment.
‘You finally believe it, don’t you?’
She flung it at him ov
er her shoulder in the hallway before walking into the lounge, choking on the bitterness of knowing that his belief had come too late.
Luke followed her.
‘Perhaps you’d better tell me what you were doing, going away for a weekend with a married man,’ he suggested quietly.
‘I tried to on Friday night,’ she reminded him caustically.
‘I thought I knew the answer then,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve now realised that I don’t.’
Because Florian Jones had made him believe that she was innocent of all that he had accused her of. Florian! Luke had never been able to believe her. Maria discovered that she was actually jealous of Florian. He had done it so easily too, vanquishing every suspicion of Luke’s with a few casual sentences.
‘All right!’ she relented savagely, her eyes dark in contrast to the pallor of rage. ‘Although you shouldn’t need to hear it, and you should never have believed what you did in the first place…God! For all his ego and vanity, even Florian has never for a moment imagined that I felt any sort of lust or love for him, although he also has no idea just how selfish and immature I do find him outside a broadcasting studio. As he said, I introduced him to Rachel. She was an old school friend, although we were out of school by then. She comes from a very strict family, and only the actual shotgun was missing when she was pregnant within weeks of meeting Flo. I think he might have resisted the pressure her father was putting on him and taken whatever consequences there might have been, but for the prospect of fatherhood. He’ll try anything once, and a baby was a novelty. Even now, in his own way, he’s proud of Joni. The baby on the way was all that the marriage had going for it, and even then, if Rachel wasn’t around, he had a roving eye, and sometimes more than an eye, although at that stage he was technically faithful, I think. I felt guilty—I seem to do that a lot, like when I couldn’t be with my parents when my father was dying, even when I know at an intellectual level that I don’t need to. It’s an emotional thing…
‘I felt guilty enough to want to help the marriage succeed because I’d introduced them and hadn’t thought to warn Rachel, mainly because I didn’t find him attractive myself and he’d never come across as the great seducer with me, and I knew that if it didn’t work, it would turn out to be a lifelong trap for her. I was naive enough to think it had a remote chance. I knew she was unhappy about his going away for a whole weekend when she was too sick to accompany him. She was afraid, and so was I. I knew what the atmosphere at stadium events can be like, the way some people discard their inhibitions and normal standards of behaviour…Oh, Rachel and I were both naive when we decided that I should go with him. If he’d met someone and wanted to be unfaithful, he would have found an opportunity and I couldn’t have stopped him. Later on, he was unfaithful, but not that weekend. So all that was really achieved then was Rachel’s temporary peace of mind at a time when she wasn’t well. She knew I’d never been interested in Florian. He knows that too. What about you, Luke?’
‘I needed to be told,’ he conceded drily, facing her across the coffee-table.
‘You didn’t ask, you didn’t want to be told until Florian convinced you that there’d never been anything between us. Florian Jones, Luke! You don’t even like him and you believed him, when you’ve never believed me!’ Maria couldn’t contain her anguished resentment. ‘You bastard! Oh, you bastard!’
‘The man is too self-centred to lie for anyone else’s sake, and he had nothing to gain by lying for his own.’
‘Amazing!’ she congratulated him mockingly. ‘Because you’re dead right about him. You hardly know him, but you can see him that clearly, understand what he’s about—and yet you’ve never understood a thing about me, and we’ve been together, sharing a bed and our weekends, for weeks now!’
A harshly reluctant sigh shook Luke.
‘No excuses here, Maria,’ he allowed tautly, and paused a moment before yielding to angry resentment. ‘Except that you were right when you once accused me of having a personal prejudice. I arrived in South Africa still stunned by the shock of hearing what my father had had to tell me, half expecting to find marriages being destroyed by outside parties every-where I looked! But damn it to hell, I’ve never been able to see clearly or think straight where you’re concerned—certainly not since you came to Taipei, and maybe not even six years ago either. I think perhaps that I actually needed to be able to think the worst of you, however personally unpalatable that worst was to me, as some sort of a defence, so that I could despise you even if it meant despising myself as well. That way I could feel justified in keeping something back, in not handing myself over to your power completely—because there was just too much feeling involved. I couldn’t risk believing in you. I didn’t want to believe in you.’
‘And now, when it’s over, Florian has made you realise that you could quite safely have done so. Is that ironical, or what?’ Maria taunted bitterly, and managed a falsely consoling smile. ‘At least you won’t have to go on feeling ashamed of me in retrospect, Luke, even if that aspect of it did mar our affair for you. I suppose that’s why you don’t seem to mind Nicky and Florian knowing about it after all now.’
‘I was expecting you to deny it when Jones guessed,’ Luke retorted.
‘You expected too much of me, then! You had no right to be ashamed of me, and I knew that all along, remember, even if you’ve only just discovered it, so I didn’t see why I should pander to your wish to keep our affair a secret,’ she confessed defiantly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the whole world could have known about it.’
‘It was never you I was ashamed of, Maria, and as for keeping our affair secret, I didn’t care one way or the other,’ Luke asserted impatiently. ‘All that came from your side——’
‘Then why could we never go out together to places where we might be seen and recognised after we became lovers?’ she demanded scornfully. ‘I embarrassed you. You didn’t want people to know about us——’
‘No, you were the one, darling,’ he cut in, irritably derisive. ‘You were ashamed of our relationship. A sex slave, didn’t you once call yourself? Every weekend there was some little reference to the danger of someone realising what was going on, and last Tuesday night too, when I had to come and see for myself if you were all right because the first reports of the earthquake were so horrifying. It may surprise you to know that I could see things from your point of view there. I’d have hated to be in your position, a purely physical attraction outweighing personal antipathy, so I just went along with your wishes. There were even times when I sympathised with you.’
‘Oh, come on, Luke!’ Maria snapped scathingly. ‘I got the idea from you in the first place, from your attitude. Even that very first night, at that party at the Estwicks’ place, you were wishing we lived in the days when a man could keep his mistress hidden away.’
‘Later I told you I’d been overreacting,’ Luke reminded her tightly. ‘But I admit that I’ve said a lot of things in the deliberate hope of hurting or humiliating you, and that was one of them.’
‘Punishing me,’ she inserted flatly.
‘I was driven by the disillusionment of six years ago,’ he acknowledged, hard-faced.
‘Because you thought I was having an affair with Florian.’
‘Until Zimbabwe, I thought I could deal with that. You were so young, at an age to want to experiment and to find a DJ a glamorous figure, that I imagined it was superficial enough to have a time limit on it. I wasn’t even sure how far things had gone between you at that stage. Another possibility, also in view of your youth, was that you’d been seduced by the idea of flouting convention by involving yourself with a married man. Youth is sometimes foolish, and rebellion for rebellion’s sake seems exciting. I was still debating between taking you away from him, waiting for it to end anyway, or doing nothing at all—the last because I knew that if your reaction to me was purely physical, I could have you…but probably damage you emotionally.’
‘Destroy me.’ It emerged bleakly. I
n the end, he had done just that.
‘Yes.’ A shadow seemed to pass over Luke’s face. ‘As I say, it was something I was handling. Then the two of you pitched up together in Zimbabwe, and it shocked me into facing realities. To me it meant that your involvement with Jones went deeper than the superficial thing I’d been imagining. Working from my assumption that there was something between the two of you anyway, it seemed obvious that you’d decided to take it much further.’
‘So you got me fired from my job,’ Maria supplied dully.
‘I’ve never been proud of the way I did that,’ Luke said simply. ‘You were one of several people who were probably going to be let go on my recommendation as part of a rationalisation programme, but the manner in which I caused it to happen…It was the one time in my life I’ve gone to pieces—lost my mind, I suppose. That was the effect you had on me. I was fundamentally hurt and hitting back. I couldn’t bear to see you again. I told myself it was because you disgusted me, but really I was afraid of what I might do and say. Partly it was pride; I couldn’t countenance exposing all that I was feeling; but—and I know this doesn’t mitigate anything, but perhaps it balances the self-interest, self-protection or whatever it was—even then I was also still afraid of succumbing to the temptation to use the power I sensed I could have over you, and the use would have been abuse.’
‘And hasn’t it been abuse now, six years later?’ Maria prompted resentfully.
‘Oh, yes, I know it has, and I don’t expect you to spare me, Maria,’ Luke conceded sardonically. ‘Hell was not having you; having you was equally hell, but a sweeter kind. No excuses, as I’ve said, and the only explanation I can offer is that I thought you loved Jones. If I’d known you didn’t, I’d have tried a different way…It doesn’t matter now, though. It’s over. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll start telephoning and find out if any of the Hong Kong-bound flights can accommodate me tonight.’
He was turning away from her to go to the telephone. Maria remained motionless, finally beginning to piece the fragments of confession together, assembling a picture of frustration she hardly dared believe she understood.
Ransacked Heart Page 16
