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‘Now, these guys with bows and arrows go up in the keep,’ Tom said, lifting out some models and setting them in place.
‘And this one can be riding across the drawbridge,’ Ethan chimed in excitedly.
Mary was so absorbed by the astonishing sight of them together that at first she didn’t notice the way her eyes were brimming with tears again. When a damp splotch rolled down her cheek she hurried away to clear the breakfast things and to make coffee.
After a while, Tom straightened again and left Ethan to play. He crossed the room to where Mary was taking a blue and white sugar bowl from an overhead cupboard.
His eyes drifted to her feet and his mouth quirked into a grim smile. Mary followed his gaze. Good grief! She was wearing one red shoe and one lime-green. Heavens, there must have been two pairs of slip-on shoes under the kitchen table and she’d taken no notice.
‘So you still have trouble making decisions, Mary-Mary.’
‘I jumped up to answer the door in a hurry,’ she muttered as she crossed the room and extracted the odd shoes from under the table. She slipped off a lime-green shoe and swapped it for a red one. ‘There, that’s better,’ she said, forcing a tiny laugh. ‘At least I’m colour coordinated now.’ She was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans.
She looked back towards Tom and their gazes linked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a tight, rueful smile. Was it her imagination, or could she see a shadowy sadness in his eyes as he looked at her for a long moment without speaking?
‘Ethan looks like you,’ he said at last. ‘Same big brown eyes and soft blond hair.’
She nodded and gulped.
‘Ed’s mighty proud of him,’ he added.
At the sound of his father’s name Ethan’s head snapped up. ‘My dad’s a Ranger,’ he announced with pride.
‘That’s right, General.’
The boy’s eyes grew huge and worried. ‘Why did you call me General?’
‘It just kind of slipped out. That’s what your dad called you when he talked about you.’
Ethan’s lower lip trembled.
‘That was Ed’s special nickname,’ Mary explained. ‘No one else called him General—only Ed.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’ Tom walked back over to Ethan, bent down and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Your dad and I were good mates.’
Don’t talk in the past tense, Mary pleaded silently. Ethan’s very bright and he picks up on any subtleties.
‘Do you know when my dad’s coming home?’ Ethan asked.
‘No,’ Tom admitted with reluctance.
The light died in Ethan’s eyes. He turned back to the knights and the castle and played with them quietly, keeping his head low, as if he needed to retreat. Sensing his mood, Tom backed away, but tension hovered in the air.
Mary fetched milk from the refrigerator and set it and the sugar bowl on the table. After a very short while Ethan asked her, ‘Can I go back to watch TV?’
‘I guess so,’ she answered, nodding.
The boy hurried away and left the castle and its splendid knights on horseback lying abandoned in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Mary worried her lower lip with her teeth. ‘He’s not dealing very well with the bad news about his father,’ she said.
‘I dare say it will take a long time.’
She frowned. ‘Why do you keep acting as if Ed’s already dead? Surely, while there’s a chance he’s alive, we should hope?’
Tom kept his gaze fixed on the abandoned castle. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance, Mary.’
‘Why are you so sure?’ she asked quietly. ‘The Army has a great support network but I can’t find out what happened. Were you there? Can you tell me?’
He swung his gaze back to hers and for the first time she saw how tired he looked. Smudges of shadow lay beneath his eyes and creases bracketed his mouth. ‘We were involved in a hot extraction. You’ve heard about them, haven’t you?’
‘Where ropes are lowered from a helicopter?’
‘That’s it. Well, we’d finished a mission in the jungle and we were ready to be winched back up—’
‘Where? Where was the mission?’
‘South-East Asia.’
‘But which country? Which jungle?’
‘You should know better than to ask me that, Mary.’
She sighed. ‘It was worth a try.’
‘Anyway, the chopper was in position above us and we were below in the jungle and we had to get out fast. Really fast. There were guerrilla fighters all around us and it was pitch black. Even with night vision goggles we couldn’t see a lot because of the dense timber, so we’re not absolutely sure what happened. But somehow, when it was Ed’s turn to ascend, the rope got tangled.’
‘Oh, no,’ Mary whispered.
‘Sometimes trees, brush or ground debris can snag it. It hardly ever happens that the rope breaks, but it did this time.’
Mary flinched and tried to blot out the picture that formed in her head. ‘So Ed fell,’ she whispered.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But what happened then? Couldn’t you find him?’
Tom heaved a loud, painful sigh.
‘You did search for him, didn’t you?’
‘We tried, but we couldn’t hang around for long. There was too much enemy fire. We had to consider the safety of the rest of the squad. And—’ He looked as if he was about to say something else and changed his mind.
‘So you just left him there?’
‘Believe me, if I had my way I’d still be looking for him now, but that’s not how the Army works. I had to follow orders. When I demanded permission to go back I had a run-in with the brass. A proper ding-dong confrontation.’ He let out a hiss of air through gritted teeth. ‘By the time I persuaded them that we should at least go back and recover his body there was no trace of him.’
Looking away from her, he stared through her kitchen window to a view across Arlington parkland. ‘I think you should resign yourself to the fact that Ed won’t be coming back, Mary. Everyone is convinced that he couldn’t have survived that fall.’
She didn’t answer, but she shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom added, and his throat worked.
The smell of coffee filled the room and Mary distracted herself by collecting the coffee pot and their mugs and setting them on the cleared kitchen table. They took seats opposite each other and Mary felt painfully self-conscious. She wondered if Tom felt as awkward as she did to be sitting in such a domesticated setting—after all these years. It was so strange to be taking coffee with Tom Pirelli as if he were no more than a friend of Ed’s.
Was he feeling as self-conscious as she was? Was he inwardly calm, or was he battling memories? She couldn’t stop thinking about the past…Their past.
Good grief, here she was, worried about her husband, and yet she was remembering it all. Dancing and laughing with Tom, kissing him, riding on the back of his motorbike, walking hand-in-hand with him in the moonlight along a beach of silver sand. Making love…
And then her father’s insistence that Tom Pirelli couldn’t possibly love her.
‘Do you take cream or sugar?’ she asked, forcing the memories aside.
‘I’ll have a little milk, no sugar, thanks.’ He watched her fill his mug and then his face broke into a smile.
‘What’s amusing you?’ she asked tightly.
‘The way you call milk cream—like a proper Yank.’
She gave an offhand shrug. ‘It happens when you spend eight years in a place. After a while you don’t even notice the differences.’
‘There are differences, though, aren’t there?’ he said, as if he were deliberately trying to steer their conversation into safe, pedestrian waters. ‘I mean, on the surface Australians and Americans seem to speak the same language, but—’
‘But here nappies are diapers and tomato sauce is ketchup.’
‘Yeah—and footpaths are sidewalks and taps are faucets.’
‘And scones are biscuits and biscuits are cookies.’ Mary smiled too.
Tom watched her, then looked away and seemed to study her kitchen. It wasn’t a remarkable kitchen but he took his time, as if he wanted to remember the yellow walls, white cupboards and sandstone-coloured bench tops, the decorative touches of blue and white pottery—Ethan’s artwork stuck on the refrigerator door with magnets. On the wall, stars and stripes fashioned in cross-stitch framed the words ‘God Bless America’.
‘Ed’s mother made that and gave it to us last Thanksgiving,’ she said, feeling a need to explain.
She sat stiffly, twisting the coffee mug back and forth and not looking at him, aware that they would very quickly run out of safe topics to discuss. ‘How is your Nonna?’ she asked. ‘I hope she’s still alive.’
Fresh smile creases showed around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. ‘You bet she is. I think nonna’s organised a special deal with God. No doubt she’s promised him that when she gets to heaven she’ll cook gnocchi gorgonzola on a regular basis, if he’ll let her stay here till she’s good and ready.’
‘You’ve always loved your nonna’s gnocchi gorgonzola, haven’t you?’
‘I’m surprised you remember.’
‘Of course I remember.’ I remember everything about you, Tom. ‘Your nonna’s very special.’
‘Yeah.’ Tom released a long sigh. ‘It’s too damn long since I’ve seen her.’
‘Are you going back to Australia now?’
‘Definitely. Soon as I can.’
The awkwardness returned and this time Tom must have decided he’d had enough. He jumped to his feet. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’d better get going.’
‘Yes,’ she said, jumping up just as quickly.
Was he happy to be leaving? Was that relief in his eyes? She remembered the way he used to smile whenever he saw her. The way his whole face would light up and his dark eyes would glow—and how she used to cling to him when it was time for them to part, begging for one more kiss—for him to hold her just a little longer.
And now they were both relieved to be parting.
He walked to the front door and she followed.
They said simple, unsatisfactory goodbyes without mentioning Ed again…Or their shared past.
Apart from the cold ache in her heart, there was nothing in the formal way they shook hands that suggested they had ever been lovers—nothing in the way she slipped her hand just a little too quickly from his that indicated that they had planned to marry.
Any second now, Tom would be turning away, walking out of her life. She knew this was best. His mission was accomplished. He’d brought the McBride family watch for Ethan and there was no more to do. Already she could sense his next move; he would execute a sharp about-turn and get the hell out of her home.
But he didn’t move.
Instead, he stood on her front step and looked at her for ages. The muscles in his throat worked. ‘Have you been happy, Mary?’
Oh, help! This was the one question in the world she didn’t want to answer. And Tom was watching her so intently she feared he must see her sudden dismay. Had it shown in her eyes? Had it twisted her mouth downwards? She couldn’t be disloyal to Ed now. He’d been a good husband. There was no one better. In a flash she recovered and sent Tom a bright smile.
‘Of course I’ve been happy,’ she said. ‘You’ve met Ed, Tom. You know what a great guy he is. He’s a very good man.’
‘Sure,’ Tom grunted. ‘Ed’s top shelf—he must have been a prize catch.’
He gave a curt nod and spun on his heel, at last eager to get away. Mary watched him and told herself she was glad he was leaving. It was best that they hadn’t made any attempt to rake up the past. What was the point? They couldn’t go back. Parting without regret or recrimination was the adult way to behave.
But as Tom’s foot touched the bottom step she felt the cruel weight of finality sink into her bones. Tom Pirelli was walking out of her life. A picture flashed before her of the last time she’d seen him, waiting on the corner, waiting to run away with her, to marry her.
And she heard herself calling suddenly, softly. ‘What about you, Tom? Have you been happy?’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE fear came the very moment Mary asked the question.
Have you been happy? As soon as the words were out she felt a dreadful quaking terror deep inside. Why? Why couldn’t she ask the question as easily as he had? And why was Tom staring at her with such a dark, accusing shadow in his eyes, as if he were angered by her question?
Was she imagining that sense of deep resentment that seemed to cling to him—as if it were a menacing presence that haunted him?
Was it guilt that made her so scared?
She had no cause to feel guilty. Eight years ago, on that night they’d tried to elope, Sonia had gone to Tom to explain why she couldn’t meet him and Mary had waited for his answer. And waited…But there had been no word. And he’d never tried to contact her afterwards.
He hadn’t suffered the agonies of disappointment that had made her so ill. He hadn’t suffered in silent, lovesick misery the way she had. And he hadn’t been left with a terrible, frightening secret. He knew nothing of the burden he had left her with, and he’d gone off to play heroes in the SAS without a backward glance in her direction.
Of course he’d been happy.
‘I haven’t been as happy as I should have been,’ he said.
