asked as they went along the corridor.
‘Yes, his heart sounds better than I expected. But he shouldn’t walk too much. It might help to have a wheelchair on hand, just in case.’
‘Gladly. You really got the better of him back there.’
‘No, you did, with your talk about profiting from the advice of experts.’ She put her hand over her mouth to smother a yawn.
‘And you’re the expert,’ he said. ‘You’d better get a little more sleep. You might find tomorrow tiring. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Where was he going? she wondered as he walked away. Back to Debra, perhaps.
She remembered hearing him spoken of as ‘a man who likes to enjoy life, taking pleasure wherever he finds it’, and she guessed the pleasures must be many. Women would be drawn to both his looks and his growing fame as a television personality. And his easygoing good nature would add to his attractions.
As for his darker side, the one that had ruined things between them, who else but her had ever discovered it?
She had no desire to sleep. She switched on the light and took out the book about the pyramids that she’d brought with her. But even this failed to calm her mind and at last she closed it, turned the light out again and went to the window that looked out over the hotel’s garden.
In the faint light she could just make out the figure of a man wandering beneath the trees. Something about him caught her attention. He seemed not merely alone but strangely cut off from his fellow humans.
Then she recognised Jackson.
So he wasn’t with Debra, she thought. Unless Debra was coming out to join him.
But minutes passed and he was still alone. Again she had the mysterious feeling that loneliness was natural to him.
How could that be? Nobody as popular as Jackson was ever lonely.
Yet the thought would not be banished. For all his large family, his popularity, Jackson had nobody who was completely his. His brothers were all happily married; his father had Janine. But he drifted through life in mysterious isolation. The thought had never occurred to her before, and now she wondered why.
He turned, looked up and saw her. She half expected him to turn away, but he raised his arm in a gesture that invited her to join him. Her heart leapt. She waved back, and hurried away to slip some shorts and a T-shirt on before going to meet Jackson.
He was waiting for her at the door.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come.’
‘But this is a lovely place. I don’t wonder you like to be here.’
He took her hand and led her through the trees to where there were some seats at the end of the garden. The pyramids were more visible now, easing their way into the light, magical, magnificent, mysterious.
For a while they sat in silence, relishing the experience, his hand still holding hers. Then he said softly, ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for coming to Egypt. It must have been difficult.’
‘I wouldn’t just abandon Amos. I know he means the world to you.’
‘In a way.’
‘In a way?’
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I love my father. But—how do I say it?—I don’t always like him. He does what suits himself, no matter who he hurts.’
He paused and she had a vivid sense of indecision tormenting him. His words were heavy with a meaning he’d never hinted at before and perhaps couldn’t speak of now.
‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ she asked gently.
His hand tightened on hers.
‘I’ve never talked about it before,’ he said huskily. ‘But now I— For the first few years of my life I seemed to be part of the ideal family. There were my parents, and Darius, my brother, and everything was fine. Then my mother found out about my brother Marcel—the son he’d had by Claire, a Frenchwoman, five years earlier.’
‘While he was still living with your mother?’
‘Yes. I think that was one of the things that hurt her most. That he’d carried on with another woman while still playing the loving husband.’
‘How could she ever believe a word he said after that?’ Freya breathed.
‘She couldn’t. She left him. They divorced and he married Claire. Darius and I lived with our mother until she died a few years later. After that we had to return to Amos.’
‘How old were you then?’
‘Eleven. I could never be at ease with Claire. It wasn’t her fault. She was my father’s victim as much as any of us. But I blamed her for my mother’s death.’
‘You don’t mean your mother—?’
‘No, she didn’t take her life. Not exactly. But she went down with an illness that she didn’t have the strength to fight, and I don’t think she wanted to fight it. I was with her when she died, and the last thing she said to me was, “I’m sorry.” Then she closed her eyes and just let go. Meanwhile Amos was playing the field again, with Travis’s mother in Los Angeles and Leonid’s mother in Moscow. Claire found out and left him, taking Marcel. By then Darius was making his own career, so I was alone with Dad for much of the time.
‘It was like living with two versions of the same person. There was the man who’d broken all our hearts and didn’t care—a man I resented. But there was also the “Big Beast”, whom the world admired and feared, and in a way I admired him too. I wanted to be like him, earn his praise. I did some really stupid things, and the stupider I was the more he approved of me.’
‘But approval wasn’t enough, was it?’ she asked.
‘No. I wanted more. I wanted—I don’t know—something else.’
‘Love,’ she said. ‘The kind that puts you first—the kind you should expect from your parents. When grown-ups are so taken up with each other they can sometimes forget what the children need.’
He stared. ‘How did you know that? Surely your parents loved you?’
‘Oh, yes, but they loved each other first. I got lavish presents, but somehow I always sensed something missing. One year my father paid for me to go on a really expensive school trip. I thought he was being generous, finding so much money for me to enjoy myself. But while I was gone he and my mother took a holiday together. I thought there would be another holiday, with the three of us, but there wasn’t. They’d seized the chance go away without me. I know it sounds crazy and self-centred to say it like this—’
‘Not to me, it doesn’t,’ Jackson said. ‘Everything’s fine on the outside, but inside there’s a place that’s sad, hollow.’
As he said it she could see the child Jackson, surrounded by money
