Tenderness.
She felt her throat catch and she dragged her eyes away, out over the road, watching the cars coming towards them, headlights on now as dusk gathered in the countryside.
‘That was then, Anatole,’ she said unsteadily. ‘A long time ago—’
‘I’ve missed it,’ he answered her.
She heard him take a breath—a ragged-sounding one.
‘I missed you, Tia, when you left me. When you walked out on me to marry my uncle, to become his pampered young bride.’ There was an edge in his voice now, like a blade.
Her eyes flew to him, widening. ‘I didn’t leave you!’ she exclaimed. ‘You finished it with me! You told me you refused to have a relationship with someone who wanted to marry you, to get pregnant by you!’
She saw a frown furrow his brow, and then he threw a fulminating look at her, his hands tightening on the wheel. ‘That didn’t mean you had to go,’ he retaliated. ‘It just meant—’ He stopped.
‘You just meant that I had to give up any idea of meaning anything to you at all—let alone as your wife or the potential mother of your children. Give up any idea of making a future with you!’
Christine’s voice was dry, like sandpaper grating on bare skin. She shut her eyes for a moment, her head swirling, then opened them again, taking another weary breath.
‘Oh, Anatole,’ she said, and her voice was weary, ‘it’s all right. I get the picture. You were young, in the prime of your carefree life. I was an amusing diversion—a novelty! One that lasted a bit longer than you probably intended at first, when you scooped me off the road. I came from an entirely different walk of life from you—I was pretty, but totally naïve. I was so blatantly smitten by you that you couldn’t resist indulging yourself—and indulging me. But I know that didn’t give me any right to think you might want me long-term. Even if...’
She swallowed painfully, knowing she had to say it.
‘Even if there hadn’t been that pregnancy...scare...’ she said the word with difficulty ‘...something else would have ended our affair. Because...’ Her throat was tight. ‘Because an affair was all it was. All it could ever be.’
She knew that now—knew it with the hindsight of her greater years. She had been twenty-three... Anatole had been the first man in her life—and a man such as she had never dreamt of, not even in her girlish fantasies! He’d taken her to fairyland—and even in her youthful inexperience she had feared that it would all be fairy gold and turn to dust.
And so it had. Painfully. Permanently.
‘But now I want more,’ he replied, and his words and the intensity of his voice made her eyes fly to him again. ‘I want much, much more than an affair with you.’
He took a breath, changing gear, accelerating on an open stretch of road as if that would give escape to the emotion building up inside him. Emotion that was frustration at her obstinacy, at her refusal to concede the rightness of what he was proposing.
‘Christine, this works—you, me and Nicky! You can see it that works. Nicky likes me, trusts me...and, believe me, I meant exactly what I said to him last night. That he can believe that his pappou sent me to look after him in his place. To become his father—’
He could have been my son! Had Tia been pregnant then—five years ago—Nicky would be my son. A handful of months older...no more.
Emotion rolled him over. Over and over and over—like a boulder propelled down a mountainside by an overwhelming, unstoppable force. Emotion about what might have been, about what had never been, that silenced him until they arrived at Vasilis’s house—now Christine’s home.
The home she kept for her son—his uncle’s son—just as the legacy of Vasilis’s work, his endless endeavours to preserve the treasures of the past, would pass to her guardianship.
And she will guard it well. How strange that I can trust her to do that, that I know now that I can trust her.
Yet it was not strange at all—not now that he had seen her in London, at the exhibition opening, and here as chatelaine of this gracious house. She had grown into it—into a woman who could do these things, be these things.
Just as I have grown into what I am doing now. Accepting that I want a wife. A child.
He scooped up the sleeping boy, cradling his weight in his arms as he walked indoors with him. Christine opened the front door, leading the way upstairs in the quiet house—both Mrs Hughes and Nanny Ruth were out for the evening.
In his bedroom, they got Nicky into bed, still fast asleep, exhausted by the day’s delights. For a moment, Anatole stood beside her as they gazed down at the sleeping child, illumined only by the soft glow of the night light.
His hand found Christine’s. She did not take it away. She stood with him as they looked down at Nicky. As if they were indeed a family indeed...
Was there a little sound from her? Something that might have been a choke? He did not know. Knew only that she’d slipped her hand from his and was walking out of the room. He looked after her, a strange expression on his face, then back at Nicky, reaching almost absently to smooth a lock of dark hair from his forehead, to murmur a blessing on the night for him.
Then he turned and went downstairs.
Christine was waiting in the hall by the front door. Her head was lifted, her expression composed.
‘Thank you for a lovely day,’ she said.
She spoke calmly, quelling all the emotion welling up inside her. What use to feel what was inside her? It was of no use—it never could be now.
She opened the door, stepped back. He came up to her, feeling that strange, strong emotion in him again. This time he made no attempt to kiss her.
‘It’s been good,’ he said.
His voice was quiet. His eyes steady. Then, with a quick smile, the slightest nod of his head, he was gone, crunching out over the gravel beneath the mild night sky.
As he opened his car door he heard the front door of the house close behind him.
Shut it, if you will—but you cannot shut me out. Not out of Nicky’s life—or yours.
Certainty filled him as to the truth of that.
* * *
In the week that followed Christine did her best to regain the state of mind she’d had since her marriage to Vasilis. But it had gone—been blown away by the return of Anatole into her life. His invasion of it.
It was an invasion that had been angrily hostile, and he had been scathing in his denunciation of her behaviour. And the searing irony of it was that anger and hostility from him was so much easier for her to cope with. What she couldn’t cope with—what she was pathetically, abjectly unable to cope with—was the way he was with her now.
Wooing!
The word stayed in her head, haunting her.
Disturbing
