had not worn peach for years, over twenty years to be exact.
And as she continued to gaze at herself, mesmerized by the peach dress, up from the inner recesses of her mind there was dredged a memory, a memory so carefully, so deliberately and so deeply buried it had lain dormant for years.
A scene enacted two decades before leapt out of her mind, was projected onto the mirror with such blinding accuracy and clarity that Francesca was propelled instantly backwards into the past. And she saw herself from a long distance, as she had once been.
A night sky. Smooth. Still. Flashed with brilliant stars. A perfect Mediterranean sky. A balmy breeze. The brinish smell of the sea mingling with the scent of honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine and eucalyptus. Candlelight glowing. Francesca sitting on the long white marble terrace of the Villa Zamir, on the promontory at Cap Martin. Francesca weeping. Katharine hovering solicitously. Katharine apologizing over and over again for being clumsy. Katharine doing nothing to help, but hovering, always hovering. Francesca barely listening. Francesca gazing in stupefied horror at the wine Katharine had spilled on her. Watching the stain seep down from the bodice on to the skirt, a red and violent stain, like fresh blood on the peach organza evening frock. A floating, romantic, dreamlike frock her father could scarcely afford. Ruined before the dance had even begun. Kim, handsome in his dinner jacket, hurrying to her with salt and soda water. And Nick Latimer arriving. Nicky mopping up Francesca’s tears, trying to be jocular and making a bad joke about tragic heroines. Her father. Sweet, consoling, concerned, but quite helpless. Doris Asternan. Her face cold with anger. Doris camouflaging the damage with a trailing spray of honeysuckle entwined with roses quickly picked from the garden. The flowers. Hardly covering the stain and wilting too soon. Francesca’s tears. Dripping on to the dress to mingle with the stain. Francesca weeping inconsolably because she had wanted to be beautiful for Victor. Francesca waiting. Waiting for Vic, who did not come. Francesca’s heart breaking …
Francesca snapped her eyes tightly shut to block out the scene, not wanting to remember any more about the past. The past was irrelevant, it no longer mattered to her. An instant later she opened her eyes and stepped swiftly away from the mirror, and she saw again a woman of forty-two, the woman she had become in the intervening years. Attractive, elegant and coolly poised. And infinitely wiser than she had been then.
She turned on her heel and left for Nelson’s dinner party.
Sleep eluded her.
Since her return from Nelson’s house several hours ago she had restlessly tossed around in the bed, unable to find repose, her eyes wide open and staring into the filtered greyness of the room. Finally, in exasperation, she sat up, turned on the light and got out of bed. Slipping into her robe, she went downstairs to the kitchen. She made herself a cup of hot milk and carried it back upstairs to the bedroom, where she sat drinking it, huddled in a chair near the fireplace, enveloped in introspection, unaware of the time or the chill in the air.
Slowly, and with some deliberation, Francesca reviewed the events of the afternoon, carefully weighing and analysing all that had happened, all that had been said. And inevitably her mind came to rest on Katharine Tempest, for she had begun to realize, during these long dawn hours, that she had over-reacted to the news of the woman’s impending return to New York and request for a meeting.
She did not want anything to disrupt or threaten her orderly and contented life. The life she had so painstakingly created with Harrison and his family. A life she enjoyed, and was comfortable living, and one she was determined to protect at all cost. Nelson was correct in his assessment of her former friend. Wherever Katharine Tempest went she dragged trouble in her wake. No, Katharine could not be permitted to enter her life again.
A sigh of deep sadness broke the heavy silence in the shadow-filled room. She and Katharine had been so very close once, inseparable for years, until that ugly denouement when everything had erupted so explosively and the loving friendship had ended abruptly, and with acrimony. They had not seen each other since that day, over ten years ago, and during this time Francesca had schooled herself not to think of Katharine, and eventually, as the years passed, she had succeeded in achieving her goal. And she had forgiven Katharine long ago, forgiven her for so many things, in the wisdom of her own growing maturity. But seemingly she had not forgotten. She understood that now.
Memories began to assail her. Memories of other times, other places, other people. She endeavoured to push them aside, clearly recognizing that memories were ineluctably treacherous. Particularly memories of Katharine, for they were shrouded in a web of turbulent emotions and raw feelings, and they evoked pain, the pain of Katharine’s own treachery and betrayal of her. But Katharine had not always been like that. Not in the beginning. She had been different then. They had all been different at that point in time.
At that point in time. Francesca repeated the phrase to herself, and she thought: There is no past, no present, no future. Time is not circumscribed. Albert Einstein proved that time is a dimension. The fourth dimension. Therefore all time exists now.
The decades dissolved. It was a gradual dissolve, like a film running in slow motion before her eyes, and everyone was in perfect focus, and brilliantly captured on the film of her memory – the way they were then. And the year 1956 was as real to Francesca as it had been twenty-three years ago.
It was now.
‘The most decisive actions of our life … are most often unconsidered actions.’
ANDRÉ GIDE
‘Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud,’ Kim said with a genial smile, lolling nonchalantly against the door frame. ‘You just said you don’t have a date this evening. Come on, Francesca, be a good sport.’
Francesca was seated behind the large cluttered desk in the upstairs study of their father’s London house. She put down the pen she was holding and leaned back in the chair, regarding her brother with affection. She was amazed to discover that for once in her life she did not feel like being a good sport, not even for her adored Kim. She had been working all day, and now, in the late afternoon, she was exhausted yet determined to finish what she had set out to do that morning. Her brother’s unexpected arrival had surprised her, so absorbed was she in her papers.
Conscious he was waiting for a response, she shook her head, and said in a weary voice that was also surprisingly firm, ‘I’d like to help you, Kim, but I simply can’t. I have to finish this research. I really do. I’m sorry.’
‘You and your mouldy old books!’ Kim exclaimed in good-natured exasperation. ‘Whenever I see you these days you’re peering into them as if your life depended on it. Who cares about Chinese Gordon anyway? If the old geezer hadn’t been dead for hundreds of years I’d say you had some sort of girlish crush on him. I don’t see the point –’
‘Gordon hasn’t been dead for hundreds of years,’ Francesca interrupted mildly enough, but her eyes were intense. ‘Seventy-one years, to be precise,’ she went on, ‘and anyway, you know very well I am going to write a biography about him one day.’
‘You’re wasting your time, my girl. Nobody will buy it.’
‘Yes they will!’ Francesca retorted fiercely, her weariness instantly dissipating.
