So…’
Leaning forward, he picked up a pen that was lying on the polished wood of the table together with a sheet of paper that held, as he knew it must, a precise order of business as prepared by Leander, whose obsessive concern for detail had not, it seemed, eased up any in the time he had been missing.
‘So this…and this…’
With a rough slashing movement he scored the pen through the first point of business and then another and another. All of them dealing with the plans to have him declared dead and transfer the management of Odysseus Shipping to his stepbrothers, just as he had expected.
‘…can go—and this…’
A couple more decisive strokes of the pen and the entire proceedings for the meeting had been obliterated apart from…
‘“Any other business”,’ he quoted cynically. ‘Well—is there any other business?’
One swift glance at the stupefied faces all around him gave him his answer and he screwed up the agenda into a tight ball and tossed it in the general direction of the waste-paper bin, heedless of whether it actually landed there or not.
‘Then I now declare this meeting at an end. And you…’
His pointed look was directed at everyone not the immediate Michaelis family.
‘Can go home.’
It was as if the command, and the general flurry of movement, with chairs pushed back and people getting to their feet, had broken the spell that had held almost everyone frozen in shock. Suddenly Jason—Jason—was coming towards him, his hand held out in greeting.
‘It’s good to have you back. Amazing.’
He actually sounded as if he meant it, Zarek reflected cynically, and if the grip that enclosed his hand was just a little too much, a degree over the top, then that was only to be expected. Jason had always been good at playing the brother card, the friendly smiling brother, when Zarek knew that deep down the younger man hated his guts for being the oldest son, the real son. The only one who would inherit.
Petros on the other hand, like his mother, could not conceal his displeasure and disappointment at the return of the man he must have hoped had gone out of his life for good, leaving the way open to a far wealthier future than he had ever dreamed of. He looked as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough and quite frankly Zarek would be glad to see him go. To see all of them go and leave him alone.
All of them except Penelope.
His wife was still sitting just where she had been when he had walked into the room. In that very first moment she had made a tiny movement, a sort of jump in her seat, and all colour had drained from her face as her eyes widened in shock. That was all.
And now she might as well be carved from marble, she sat so still and pale. It was impossible to read what was going on in her head, behind those clouded eyes. And it was almost impossible not to turn and walk out of the room, leaving all of them—but most of all leaving her—behind him.
Was that the face of an innocent woman? A woman who had been mourning the supposed death of her husband, living with his loss for the past two years? Or was it the face of a woman who, if the scene he had witnessed last night had anything to do with it, had been looking forward to moving on, taking with her the fortune she had earned through a few short months in his bed?
Where was the warm welcome that any husband had a right to expect under such circumstances? Where was the gasp of relief, the rush into his arms, the ardent embrace that told him how much he had been missed? That she was so glad that he was home safe. That she was so glad that he was alive and had come back to her.
But this was just what he should have expected from her on his return. Hadn’t she threatened—promised—him that this was how it would be?
‘If you go, then don’t expect me to be here waiting for you when I get back!’
Once again Penny’s angry voice, the furious words she had flung at him, echoed down through the years from the day he had left Ithaca and set out on the Troy.
‘This marriage isn’t worth staying for as it is. If you walk out that door then you are saying it’s over…’
But he had walked out of the door. Of course he had. The trials for the Troy were important, vital if they were to get the new design completed and on the market. And he’d thought he was giving them both room to breathe, to think. But then he’d believed he’d be gone and back again in a couple of days. Not a couple of years.
So why was she still here? Why had she stayed? For him in the hope that he would come back and they could start again, try to do something to redeem the hell that their marriage had become? Or had the news of his ‘death’ reached the island soon enough to stop her from leaving as she had said she would? And what had she stayed for? The vast inheritance that would now be hers rather than the part-share that would have come to her in a divorce settlement? Or the closeness with Jason that perhaps had been there all the time, but he had been too blind to see?
The scar along his right temple throbbed and ached, making him rub at it in discomfort, and he caught the sudden twist of Penny’s head in sharp reaction. So if she hadn’t known who he was last night, she did now.
And it worried her, that much was clear from the look—of guilt?—of apprehension that flashed across her face.
‘Welcome back…’
‘Good to see you safe…’
The conventional greetings, the slightly tentative slaps on the back, a shake of his hand, were the instinctive responses of the men who had worked for him. But he barely really heard them, acknowledged them only in an abstracted way. His attention was focused solely on the woman at the opposite side of the room.
‘And what about you, sweet wife?’
Zarek turned towards where Penny still sat at the far end of the table, an empty water glass gripped in a hand that was clenched rather too tight, with the knuckles of her fingers showing white.
‘Wh—what about me?’
‘Nothing to say?’ he challenged.
‘No…’
Nothing she could manage to get her thoughts under control enough to put into any sort of order, Penny told herself privately. Her head was still spinning, her mind totally unfocused. Now she knew exactly why the maid whose scream they had heard had reacted as she’d done, dropping the tray of coffee cups in shock at Zarek’s unexpected and unbelievable appearance. In that first moment that he had walked through the door, Penny felt she might actually do the same and send the glass she held flying to the floor to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces, and it was only the polished surface of the table underneath it that saved it from destruction.
She had reacted on a violent sense of shock in the moment she had first seen him, half rising to her feet and then sinking back down again just as sharply, frozen in a whirling storm of complete disbelief, bewilderment and not knowing what to do. And just like the maid who had reacted so forcefully to Zarek’s arrival home, she didn’t know if she wanted to scream out loud in an ecstasy of joy or express a wild rush of fear at what she saw.
The
