Deception and Desire (7 page)

‘Yes. Well. What's worrying me at the moment is how on earth I'm going to cope today without her. And now, on top of everything else, this Reubens business! It really is too bad!'

‘What is too bad?'

Liz jumped as the man's voice spoke from the doorway behind her, and a sweet smile of pure joy erased Dinah's frown.

‘Steve! I didn't know you were coming in this morning!'

‘You can always count on me to surprise you.' He grinned and the corners of his eyes crinkled engagingly. ‘You sound pretty browned off. Is something wrong?'

‘Everything. Just don't ask.'

‘Anything I can do?' Though he was speaking to Dinah he managed a sideways glance at Liz so that it almost appeared the offer was directed at her. Liz turned a little pink as she always did when he looked at her that way. ‘He is such a dish you wouldn't believe!' she had told her friends. ‘Fantastically good-looking and a real man too – you know what I mean! He used to be a diver on an oil rig in the North Sea. It's hard to get more macho than that!'

‘Just come and talk to me for five minutes, Steve,' Dinah said. ‘That alone will do me the world of good.'

‘You want me to come back later, Miss Marshall?' Liz asked, hovering.

‘Yes. Organise us some coffee, would you?'

Liz left and Dinah looked at the young man with pleasure, taking pride in his tall, fair good looks and the easy way he had with clothes – dark blazer, striped shirt, light-beige chinos, stylish handmade moccasins. He was, she thought, everything she could have hoped for and more. His presence calmed her edgy mood, his very existence made everything worthwhile.

The warmth inside her grew and spread, a special feeling that had not dimmed one iota since the day he had walked back into her life.

Her son. When she had parted with him as a baby, forced by circumstances beyond her control to give him up for adoption, she had never expected to see him again. Over the years she had thought of him often, imagining him growing up, wondering what he looked like and what he was doing, aching for him with a terrible overwhelming longing that was sometimes so fierce it was a physical pain. Nothing had erased the memory of when they had first placed him in her arms; the smell of him was a faint but unforgettable aroma in her nostrils, the feel of his small firm body nestled against her breast had filled her with love, the image of his soft baby face with its pursed-up mouth and unwinking blue eyes was imprinted on her heart. Not a Christmas had gone by but she had imagined what it would have been like if he had been there, she had pictured his excitement and wept inwardly that she could not share it, and each year on his birthday she had spent some time alone, reliving the day he had been born and weeping for the desperately frightened girl she had been then, faced with an impossible decision.

But she had kept it all to herself. Van, she had known, would be angry if he guessed at the way her thoughts ran.

‘If only I knew he was all right – that's all I want,' she had said once and seen Van's face grow dark with impatience.

‘Of course he's all right! And that isn't all you want,' he had replied. ‘If you had one bit of information you'd want more – and more. There would be no stopping it.'

She had known in her heart, even then, that he was right. What she really wanted was to have Stephen with her, to see him, to hear his voice, to hold him in her arms again. But it was a hopeless dream. She had no idea who had adopted him. Absolute confidentiality was part of the deal. She had no rights – none at all. In all likelihood she would go to her grave wondering about him.

She had accepted it, on a conscious level at least. She had given Stephen up, and as far as she was concerned that had to be the end of the matter. Yet the spark of hope had refused to die and she had continued to cherish the hope that one day, God willing, she would find him again.

And all the longing, all the silent prayers, had been answered. Steve's letter had arrived shortly after Van had died. Dinah had been at her lowest ebb, stunned at the brutal way in which she had lost the man who had been so much more than husband and business partner for more than half her life. Grief was still raw, anger at the cruelty of fate and even a little anger at Van himself for leaving her so unceremoniously had just begun to manifest itself. Etched clearly in her memory was the way she had felt that morning, the morning that, though she had not known it at the time, was about to change her life.

She had been crying, she remembered, the sort of terrible tearing sobs that racked her body and turned her beautiful face haggard, and between the sobs she had railed at Van. Why hadn't he gone to see his doctor about those chest pains? Why had he been so ready to dismiss them as the result of an overindulgence of rich food and fine wine? And why, most of all, had he decided to fly his plane that day? There had been no need for him to. He could easily have taken the company Lear jet to the meeting he was to attend and asked the professional pilot he employed to fly it. But Van loved his Cessna. He flew it whenever he could, so that at times the Lear jet and the professional pilot seemed like unnecessarily expensive additions to the Vandina budget.

He shouldn't have done it! Dinah had wept. Any normal man would have realised his health was cracking up and allowed someone else to take some of the stresses and strains for him. But Van had not been any normal man. He was exceptional, his determination to remain in the driving seat as solid as the image his barrel-chested bulk portrayed. Van had made a success of himself and of her because of that determination; in the end he had died because of it.

At last Dinah's spasm of grief had passed and she had gone downstairs, still pale beneath the foundation she had applied, her eyes still a little red and puffy from weeping. The mail had arrived and she had taken it with her into the drawing room where she had steeled herself to begin to wade through it.

As always there were many letters of condolence, each one a fresh knife-wound in Dinah's heart. It was good of people to write, of course, and one day she felt sure the words of praise that they heaped on Van would be of some consolation to her. But at present reading them was painful, a terrible reminder of what she had lost.

One letter bore an Aberdeen postmark. She did not recognise the handwriting, but then plenty of the letters had come from people she had never even heard of, business acquaintances of Van's, old school friends, even complete strangers who had simply read of the tragedy in the newspapers and felt moved to write to his widow. Mostly they were kind letters – the few spiteful ones she had quickly consigned to the wastepaper basket.

For some reason Dinah had hesitated over the letter with the Aberdeen postmark. Intuition, perhaps? No, that was putting it too strongly. But there
had
been some kind of knowledge hovering on the very edges of her consciousness before the cloak of grief had descended once more, dulling her senses. Then she had torn the envelope open and extracted the sheet of paper inside. Fairly cheap paper, written on with a ballpoint pen. She glanced at the address. Epsilon Rig, Forties Field. An oil rig? Who had Van known who worked on an oil rig?

She had begun to read the letter and suddenly she was shaking, the use gone out of her hands so that the paper almost fluttered and fell.

The letter was from a young man who said he was her son. He had always known he was adopted, he wrote, and a year earlier he had applied for his original birth certificate and discovered that she was his mother. At the time he had done nothing about it. He had been too afraid she would not want anything to do with him. But now he had read in the newspapers that Van had died and he wondered if there was anything he could do to help. Perhaps he was being presumptuous but he did so much want to meet her. Was there any possibility that she might feel the same way?

Was there a possibility? Never in all her life could Dinah remember having experienced such a rush of joy as she had felt then. It lifted her, catapulting her into a whirlpool of emotion that left her breathless. In that moment she was afraid as well as wildly elated – afraid of meeting the son she had not seen since he was just two weeks old, afraid she would be unable to cope with the situation, afraid of what he would be like, afraid she might not live up to his expectations, or he to hers.

But those fears had all been unfounded, she thought now, looking at Steve smiling at her across her paper-strewn desk. He was everything she had hoped for – and more. And thank God he had not simply visited her and then vanished again as she had been so afraid he might. She couldn't have borne to lose him twice.

‘So – what's worrying you, Dinah?' he asked now, sitting down opposite her in one of the blue leather chairs she disliked so heartily and stretching his long legs. ‘Is it business?'

‘It's always business,' Dinah said. ‘But just for now, don't let's talk about it.'

He raised an eyebrow in a lazy, quizzical gesture.

‘Suit yourself. But remember, if there is anything I can do you only have to say the word.'

Dinah nodded. ‘I know. And whether you realise it or not, that really is one of the most important things.'

He looked doubtful. She saw it in his startlingly clear light-blue eyes. Where had those eyes come from? She sometimes wondered.

‘It's the truth,' she told him and knew that it was.

Ros's absence, the anxiety about the meetings that were scheduled for the coming day, even the Reubens business all paled into insignificance beside this one very important fact of life.

Steve was here. After almost thirty years of separation they were together again. And set against that yardstick nothing else mattered.

The Inter-European Airways jet was approaching Bristol Airport, coming in low over the Somerset countryside. Maggie looked out of her window, peering down at the patchwork of fields dotted with houses and farms, the dark clumps of trees, the blue expanse of water that made up the Chew Valley lakes. They were valleys, she remembered, that had been artificially flooded to make reservoirs to provide water supplies for the city and the surrounding areas. Beneath one of them was an entire village, houses, pub, church. The people who had once lived there still felt bitter and sad about what had happened; in times of drought when the water receded they gathered at the edge of the lake and walked down on to the dry caked mudflats trying to make out the tower of the church and pointing out the spot where their house had been to anyone who would stop and take an interest.

Today, however, apart from the wildfowl and a few fishermen, the lakes looked deserted and the water, dark and mysterious, kept its secrets.

‘Looks like we're back to the English weather!' the man sitting next to Maggie grumbled.

He was still wearing a singlet more suited to the sunshine of Corfu than this damp grey day. When he had moved in beside her Maggie had been unable to avoid noticing that his arms were scorched red from too much unwise sunbathing and the skin across his shoulders and back was peeling away in big flaky bubbles.

He was a holidaymaker, of course – herself excluded, holiday-makers made up the entire passenger list of the plane, she guessed, and she knew she had been lucky to get a seat at such short notice.

Lucky – and crazy, as Ari had maintained.

‘You can't go to England just like that!' he had said when he had finally come home the previous night to find her packing. ‘It's madness!'

‘I have to go,' she had said, trying to make him understand. ‘I'm really worried about Ros. And it's not as if I have anything to stop me. No one will even notice I've gone.'

‘My mother will notice,' he said, deliberately misunderstanding her. ‘It's the big family get together next week and you know how she likes everyone to be there. Besides, aren't you supposed to be helping her to wash the carpet?'

Washing the great carpet squares that covered the living room floors in Corfiote houses was an important annual event. In a country where carpet shampooers were all but unheard of, the carpets had to be scrubbed and then spread out in the sun to dry, a job which needed at least two women to manage it.

The suggestion that Maggie should postpone her trip until the carpet wash had been done grated on her already frayed nerves.

‘I should have thought finding my sister was just a little bit more important than washing the carpet!' she had retorted scathingly. ‘It can be done any time between now and September and if I'm not here your sister will just have to chip in and help.'

Ari's mouth had tightened.

‘You are being childish now, getting at my sister. She has her hands full with three small children. Anyway, I'm not very happy about this – you just deciding to pack up and go without consulting me.'

‘If you'd been here I would have consulted you. But you weren't here. You never are. Where have you been until this time?'

‘You know where I have been – working hard to put food on the table and clothes on your back.'

That had been the point when Maggie's temper had finally snapped, and now, looking out of the aircraft at the green sweep of countryside beneath her, she saw only Ari's arrogantly handsome face scowling at her with displeasure and heard only her own angry voice above the buzzing that always affected her ears when flying, or, more specifically, coming in to land.

‘You haven't been working until this time of night, surely? What do you take me for, Ari – a fool?'

He had stared at her, his black eyes narrowing.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Just what I say. I don't believe you have been at your office all this time. You've been with
her
, haven't you? Melina Skripero. Your secretary or whatever it is she's supposed to be.'

For a moment she had thought Ari was going to strike her. An expression of fury contorted his features, an expression so thunderous that a cold hand of fear clutched at her stomach. But Ari was not a violent man. For all his hot Mediterranean temper he had never laid a finger on her and he did not do so now. After a moment his angry expression hardened into something very like guilty defiance.