Fast Friends (66 page)

‘
I can’t see,’ moaned
the man, shaking his head and strug
gling to release his hands. Camilla,
moving closer, put her arms around him. Now there was blood on her own hands
and on her
white skirt. As she wiped the
warm, sticky liquid from his
forehead he coughed and spat out a front
tooth.

‘
You’re not blind,’ she
told him, wondering how she could
feel so ill and at the same time sound
so calm. "There’s a cut on
your head
and the blood’s run into your eyes. You’re not blind,
and you’re going to be
all right.
An
ambulance is on its way.
What’s your name?’

For a moment he seemed not to be able
to remember. His
head moved helplessly
from side to side and she said urgently, ‘Don’t move. You’re safe. I’m here. My
name’s Camilla.’

‘Eddie. Edward Fairbank. My wife . . . she’s expecting me
home . I was playing golf this morning . .

Camilla, her mind flooded with the terrible memories of
that
evening just over a year ago, felt her
chest heave. But I musn’t
cry, she
told herself fiercely. Mustn’t cry, mustn’t think about
that. . .

The urgent blast of the ambulance’s
siren came as such a
relief that
she felt sweat trickle down the back of her neck.

‘
It’s
OK, they’re here. Give me your phone number and I’ll
call your wife, tell her that you’re all right.’

‘
I’m not all right,’
groaned the man, squeezing her hand so
hard that Camilla winced.

‘
You’re alive,’ she
said fiercely, then closed her eyes and
willed herself not to be angry with him. In a quieter voice she
went on, ‘You’re very lucky. You’ve had an
accident. But you
aren’t going to die,
are you? So give me your wife’s phone
number. I’ll find out from the
ambulance men which hospital
they’re going
to take you to. And just remember – you’re
going
to be OK.’

* * *

 
In
the dim, secluded corner of a tiny Greek restaurant across
the road Camilla succumbed to the
grief and shock which
earlier she had managed to stave off. The ancient proprietor,
who had also seen the accident occur
and who had been the
one to call
the ambulance, wondered but did not ask why she
should have been so deeply affected by it. People, he decided
with
a shrug, had their reasons and this English woman clearly didn’t want to share
them. The pain in her eyes, though, was unconcealed.

To help her as much as he could he moved her car from its
rakishly parked place on to a meter, plied her with strong Greek coffee and
left the telephone at her table.

‘I’m phoning on behalf of your husband,’ Camilla had told
Edward Fairbank’s wife as rapidly and reassuringly as possible.
‘He’s all right, but he has had a minor accident in
his car. He
asked me to tell you that he’s being taken to the
Whittington Hospital, but please don’t worry, he really isn’t hurt badly. Just
cuts and bruises.’

Then, when there was no longer any
need to remain in
control, when her duty
was over, she gave herself up to the
nightmare.
Memories of Matt came flooding back, as vividly as
if his own accident
had just occurred.

That was what it had been like for him – the unbelievable
suddenness of that split second when calm had become chaos.
When life had become near-death. And when, later
that night,
life for Matt had ceased to exist.

For one bewildering, agonizing moment Camilla had thought
she was being given a slow-motion replay of Matt’s
accident.
Then, to her shame, she had resented Edward Fairbank for not
being Matt, and for being alive. Would he ever truly appreciate how lucky he
had been to escape with such relatively minor
injuries?
Would his wife ever understand the extent of her
reprieve?

And why had
they
been spared, when she and Matt had not?

Chapter 48

The restaurant owner watched from his
own corner while
Camilla
wiped away her tears. Despite the heat she was shivering
and the coffee sitting in front of
her had gone cold. Her white
skirt was
smeared with blood, her pale stockings shredded. She still looked terribly
shocked and upset.

Stiff upper lip English, he thought with mounting incompre
hension and frustration and moving slowly,
anxious not to startle
her, he approached the small table where she sat.

‘
Is there anything I
can do, madam?’ he asked, his English
good but heavily accented, his
dark eyes sympathetic. ‘Perhaps
you should
telephone your husband, for him to collect you. Is
that a good idea?’

Nico, sprawling sideways in his chair in the private
dining room
at Cino’s, glanced at his watch
for the hundredth time. Two
fifteen. Where on earth was Camilla?

He debated ringing her home a third time. Before, there
had been no reply and he had assumed she was on her way to meet him. Now, as he
pulled off his tie in agitation and tossed it over the chair where his charcoal
grey jacket already hung, he was
beginning to
wonder whether something had happened to her –
or whether for some reason
she had simply chickened out.

Impatiently, he picked up the phone,
cradling the receiver
close to his ear to block out the sounds of revelry coming from
the main restaurant. The rip-roaring party next door only
accentuated the silence in his own private room.
When the
telephone was picked up, he thought he must have dialled the
wrong number. ‘I’m sorry, is Camilla there?’

‘
No, I’m afraid she’s
out at the moment. Who are you?’
enquired a girl with a Geordie accent.

‘A friend,’ said Nico carefully. ‘Have you any idea where
she might be?’

‘Yeah, she’s left a note here. Hang on . . . she’s gone to
see someone called Zoë. Does that help?’

‘Thanks,’ he said, puzzled and slightly irritated. ‘I’ll
ring her there.’

Zoë, when he eventually obtained her number from directory
enquiries, was equally surprised.

‘
Oh, hi Nico. No, Camilla isn’t here. Why,
should she be?’

Telling her that he had only called
on the off-chance, he replaced the receiver and looked at his watch again.
Being
stood up was a new
experience for him, but it appeared to be happening now.

Well, she really picked her moment,
thought Nico with
mounting anger and
disappointment. So much for the afternoon
planned
to change both their lives. Obviously Camilla had
realized, at least in part, the implications of
today’s lunch date
and had decided she didn’t need the hassle.

She simply wasn’t interested, he realized grimly, his
stomach
churning with the cold, sickening
reality of rejection. After
hours of
delicious, terrifying anticipation the finality and sense
of anti-climax was brutally fierce. What might have
been was
now lost for ever. Shit, shit, shit.

He wouldn’t be there, thought Camilla, leaving the car and
hailing a
passing cab. Not now . . . it was almost two thirty. She
should have
phoned the restaurant, she thought helplessly, but until a few minutes ago it
simply hadn’t occurred to her. And as
Charlotte
had borrowed her mobile without asking, again, she
was out of luck. All
she had been able to think about in her state of shock had been Matt, and when
she had finally remembered Nico, out of the shock and grief had come a
resurgence of guilt.

No matter how strenuously she might deny it to herself,
deep
down she was chillingly aware of the
formidable attraction
between Nico and herself. He had shown his hand
over and over
again in different ways,
sometimes teasingly, at other times
with
heart-stopping honesty. Finding himself trapped in a
marriage which wasn’t all it might be, he freely
admitted to
having had other affairs, and it appeared now that this was
what
he had in mind for her, even knowing as
he did the strength of
her views about such harmful deception.

‘Belgravia,’ Camilla told the cab driver, then quite
helplessly
heard herself say, ‘No, sorry,
Cino’s restaurant in Kensington.
Do you, by any chance, have a mobile I
could borrow?’

‘
Sorry love, my son left it switched on, the
batteries are flat.’

Fate,
Camilla thought, just wasn’t on her side.

Nico drew her like a magnet. Even though he would almost
certainly have left there by now she clung to the thought that he might have
decided to stay and eat. He might just still be there,
and she needed to at least speak to him before he left the
country.
They had to talk – Nico knew that too. And whilst she couldn’t possibly become
just another in his long line of affairs, she wanted him to understand how much
he meant to her.

He was, after all, the only man on this earth to whom she
was
seriously attracted. It was plain bad
luck, thought Camilla
with infinite
sadness, that he should be married to someone
else.

* * *

 
As the cab wove through the
mid-afternoon traffic Camilla
pulled out
her make-up bag and rapidly applied powder, lipstick,
and a fine mist of perfume. Then, thinking superstitiously that
if
she was wearing make-up Nico wouldn’t be there, she wiped off the lipstick with
a tissue.

Nico, flinging his jacket and tie on to the passenger seat
of the
black Lotus, jammed the key into the
ignition and revved like
mad, just to
irritate a couple of middle-aged women about to
cross the road. Pulling away from the kerb at top speed, he saw
a black taxi brake to avoid him, the cabbie
indicating with an
index finger to
his forehead what he thought of his bad-tempered
driving.

Sod you, thought Nico, raising two fingers in return and
hating
everyone. What a bloody,
bloody
awful day.

Camilla stepped out of the taxi, glancing down the road at
the disappearing Lotus and wondering wildly if it could have been
Nico. No, of course it wasn’t. He wouldn’t drive
that recklessly
– and besides, when he had taken her to Wimbledon he had
still been driving the metallic grey Lamborghini.

Inside the restaurant, Cino stared at
her, his professional
smile glazing slightly as he took in her blood-spattered skirt
and wrecked stockings.

‘
Mr Coletto was expecting
me,’ said Camilla embarrassed.
‘I’m very late. I shouldn’t think for a minute
that he’s still here.’

‘
Madame,’ Cino’s voice expressed genuine Italian
distress.
‘He leave only one moment ago. One moment! In a black sport
car . . . you miss him by so much.’ With his
thumb and forefinger
he indicated a couple of millimetres, his dark eyes
wide with
dismay.
The young woman was a mess, but beautiful, and who
was he to prejudge her? Her non-arrival earlier had certainly
put poor Nico into the blackest of moods, he
reminded himself,
so she must be important to him in one way or another.

‘Damn,’ said Camilla, her own tone registering just as
much
distress. Hastily she scrabbled in her
bag for her purse. ‘Could
I possibly come in and use your phone?’

Caroline, returning home from the Sanctuary feeling
pampered
and sensual, was annoyed to find
Nico out. Here she was,
manicured,
glowing brown from her session on the ultra-tan
sunbed, moisturized all
over and about to be parted from her husband for an entire month . . . and he
had disappeared.