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‘At least Carla died knowing that you loved her, and she loved you,’ his mother had said to him softly after the funeral and then, like now, he had turned away, his face a mask of pain. What would his mother say if she knew how he had betrayed that love?
And the woman who had tempted him stood beside him now, mocking him and tempting him still in her prissy-looking worksuit. He would be tied to Lisi for ever, he realised—because children made a bond between two people which could never be broken.
‘Philip?’ Her voice had softened, but that was instinctive rather than intentional for she had seen the look of anguish which had darkened the carved beauty of his features. ‘Shall we go inside, or did you want to look round the garden first?’
He shook his head. ‘Inside,’ he said shortly.
Lisi had not been inside since the day when all the packing crates had made the faded old home resemble a warehouse. She had perched on one waiting for the removals van to arrive, her heart aching as she’d said goodbye to her past. Tim had lain asleep in his Moses basket by her feet—less than six months at the time—gloriously unaware of the huge changes which had been taking place in his young life.
Unbelievable to think that this was the first time she had been back, but Marian had understood her reluctance to accompany clients around her former home. Until Philip Caprice had swanned into the office and made his autocratic demand Lisi hadn’t set foot inside the door.
Until today.
Lisi had to stifle a gasp.
When she had lived here with her mother there had been very little money, but a whole lot of love. Surfaces had been dusted, the floorboards bright and shiny, and there had always been a large vase of foliage or the flowers which had bloomed in such abundance in the large gardens at the back.
But now the house had an air of neglect, as if no one had bothered to pay any attention in caring for it. A woman’s tee shirt lay crumpled on one corner of the hall floor and a half-empty coffee cup was making a sticky mark on the window-ledge. Lisi shuddered as she caught the drift of old cooking: onions or cabbage—something which lingered unpleasantly in the unaired atmosphere.
She knew from statistics that most people decided to buy a house within the first few seconds of walking into it. At least Philip was unlikely to be lured by this dusty old shell of a place. She thought of the least attractive way to view it, and she, above all others, knew the place’s imperfections.
‘The kitchen is along here,’ she said calmly, and proceeded to take him there, praying that the divorcing couple had not had the funds to give the room the modernisation it had been crying out for.
She led the way in and let out an almost inaudible sigh of relief. Not only was the kitchen untouched, but it had clearly been left during some kind of marital dispute—for a smashed plate lay right in the centre of the floor. Pots and pans, some still containing food, lay on the surface of the hob, and there was a distinctly nasty smell emanating from the direction of the fridge.
He waited for her to make some kind of fumbling apology for the state of the place, but there was none, she just continued to regard him with that oddly frozen expression on her face.
‘Like it?’ she asked flippantly.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Hardly. Where’s the dining room?’
‘I’m afraid that it’s some way from the kitchen,’ she said, mock-apologetically. ‘It isn’t a terribly well-designed property—certainly not by modern standards.’
‘You really don’t want me to buy this house, do you, Lisi?’
‘I don’t want you to buy any house in Langley, if you must know.’ And especially not this one. She put on her professional face once more. ‘Would you like to see the dining room?’
‘I can’t wait,’ he answered sardonically.
The dining room looked as though it had never had a meal eaten in it; instead there was a pile of legal-looking papers heaped up on the table, as if someone had been using it for a office. Philip looked around the room slowly, but said nothing.
‘Where next?’ asked Lisi brightly.
‘To the next enchanting room,’ he murmured.
Perversely, his criticism stung her, making her realise that she was still more attached to the place than she was sure she should be. How she wished he could have seen it when she had lived here, particularly at this time of the year. At Christmas it had come into its own. The hall used to be festooned with fresh laurel from the garden and stacks and stacks of holly and great sprigs of mistletoe had been bunched everywhere.
The choir would come from the church next door on Christmas Eve, and drink sherry and eat mince pies and the big, wide corridors would echo with the sound of excited chatter, while in the sitting room a log fire had blazed out its warmth.
Fortunately—or unfortunately in Lisi’s case—no neglect could mar the beauty of the sitting room. The high ceiling and the carved marble fireplace drew the attention away from the fact that the curtains could have done with a good clean.
Philip nodded and walked slowly around the room, his eyes narrowing with pleasure as he looked out of the long window down into the garden beyond.
A winter-bare garden but beautiful nevertheless, he thought, with mature trees and bushes which were silhouetted against the curved shapes of the flower beds.
Lisi wandered over to the window and stood beside him, past and present becoming fused for one brief, poignant moment.
‘You should see it in springtime,’ she observed fondly.
He heard the dreamy quality of her voice which was so at odds with her attitude of earlier. ‘Oh?’
‘There are bulbs out everywhere—daffodils and tulips and narcissi—and over there…’ she pointed to where a lone tree stood in the centre of the overgrown lawn ‘…underneath that cherry, the first snowdrops come out and the lawn is sprinkled with white, almost as if it had been snowing.’
The sense of something not being as it should be pricked at his senses. Instincts, Khalim had taught him. Always trust your instincts.
‘You seem to know this house very well for someone who only works part-time in the estate agency,’ he observed softly.
She turned to face him. What was the point of hiding it from him? ‘You’re very astute, Philip.’
‘Just observant.’ His dark brows winged upwards in arrogant query. ‘So?’
‘I used to live here.’ No, that remark didn’t seem to do the place justice. ‘It was my childhood home,’ she explained.
There she was, doing it again—that vulnerable little tremble of her mouth which made him want to kiss all her hurt away.
‘What happened?’ he asked abruptly.
‘After my father died, it was just my mother and me—’
He sounded incredulous. ‘In this great barn of a place?’
‘We loved it,’ she said simply.
He let his eyes roam once more over the high ceilings. ‘Yes, I can see that you would,’ he said slowly.
‘We couldn’t bear to leave it. When my mother died, I had to sell up, of course—because there was Tim to think about by then.’
‘So you sold this and bought the cottage?’ he guessed. ‘And presumably banked the rest?’
She nodded.
He thought of her, all alone, struggling along with a little baby, and he felt the sharp pang of conscience. ‘Lisi, why in God’s name didn’t you contact me? Even if I hadn’t been able to offer you any kind of future—don’t you think that I would have paid towards my son’s upkeep?’
She gave him a look of icy pride. ‘I wasn’t going to come begging to you, cap in hand! I had to think of what was best for everyone, and I came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to cut all ties.’
‘And did you enjoy playing God with people’s lives?’
She heard his bitterness. ‘I thought it would only complicate things if I tried to involve you—for you, for me, for Tim. And for your wife, of course,’ she finished. ‘Because if it had been me, and my husband had done what you did to her—it would have broken my heart.’ She looked at him and her eyes felt hot with unshed tears for the dead woman she had unknowingly deceived. But not Philip—his betrayal had been cold-bloodedly executed. ‘Did she know, Philip? Did your wife ever find out?’
‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Carla never knew anything about it.’
‘Are you sure? They say that wives always know—only sometimes they pretend not to.’ She stared at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘How could you do it? How could you do that to her and live with yourself afterwards?’
Her condemnation of him was so strong that he felt he could almost reach out and touch it, but he knew he couldn’t let her stumble along this wrong track any longer, no matter how painful the cost of telling her.
‘She didn’t know,’ he ground out, ‘because she wasn’t aware. Not of me, or you, or what happened. Not aware of anything.’
She blinked at him in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The night I made love to you—my wife hadn’t spoken to me for eighteen months.’
Foolish hope flared in her heart, putting an entirely differentperspective on events. ‘You mean…you mean that you were separated?’
He gave a bitter laugh at the unwitting irony of her words. ‘In a sense, yes—we had been separated for a long time. You see, the car crash happened before I met you, Lisi, not after. It left her in a deep coma from which she never recovered. She didn’t die for several months after…after…’
‘After what?’ she whispered.
His eyes grew even bleaker. ‘After I made love to you. You must have been about six months pregnant when she died.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE sitting-room of her childhood retreated into a hazy blur and then came back into focus again and Lisi stared at Philip, noting the tension which had scored deep lines down the side of his mouth.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Don’t you?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘My wife—’
His wife. His wife. ‘What was her name?’
He hesitated, then frowned. What was it to her? ‘Carla,’ he said, grudgingly.
Carla. A person who was referred to as a ‘wife’ was a nebulous figure of no real substance, but Carla—Carla existed.Philip’s wife. Carla. It hurt more than it had any right to hurt. ‘Tell me,’ she urged softly.
He wasn’t looking for her sympathy, or her understanding—he would give her facts if she wanted to hear them, but he wanted nothing in return.
‘It happened early one autumn morning,’ he began, and a tale he had not had to recount for such a long time became painfully alive in his mind as he relived it. ‘Carla was driving to work. She worked out of London,’ he added, as if that somehow mattered. ‘And visibility was poor. There were all the usual warnings on the radio for people to take it easy, but cars were driving faster than they should have done. A lorry ran into the back of her.’ He paused, swallowing down the residual rage that people were always in a hurry and stupid enough to ignore the kind of conditions which led to accidents.
‘When the paramedics arrived on the scene, they didn’t think she’d make it. She had suffered massive head injuries. They took her to hospital, and for a while it was touch and go.’
Lisi winced. What words could she say that would not sound meaningless and redundant? He must have heard the same faltering platitudes over and over again. She nodded and said nothing.
‘Her body was unscathed,’ he said haltingly. ‘And so was her face—that was the amazing thing.’ But it had been a cruel paradox that while she had lain looking so perfect in the stark hospital bed—the Carla he had known and loved had no longer existed. Smashed away by man’s disregard for safety.
‘I used to visit her every day—twice a day when I wasn’t out of London.’ Sitting there for hours, playing her favourite music, stroking the cold, unmoving hand and praying for some kind of response, some kind of recognition he was never to see again. Other than one slight movement of her fingers which had given everyone false hope. ‘But she was so badly injured. She couldn’t speak or eat, or even breathe for herself.’
‘How terrible,’ breathed Lisi, and in that moment her heart went out to him.
‘The doctors weren’t even sure whether she could hear me, but I talked to her anyway. Just in case.’
He met a bright kind of understanding in her eyes and he hardened his heart against it. ‘I was living in a kind of vacuum,’ he said heavily. ‘And work became my salvation, in a way.’ At work he had been forced to put on hold the human tragedy which had been playing non-stop in his life. He gave her a hard, candid look. ‘Women came onto me all the time, but I was never…’
She sensed what was coming. ‘Never what, Philip?’
‘Never tempted,’ he snarled. ‘Never.’ His mouth hardened. ‘Until you.’
So she was the scapegoat, was she? Was that why he had seemed so angry when he had walked back into her life? ‘You make me sound like some kind of femme fatale,’ she said drily.
He shook his head. That had been his big mistake. A complete misjudgement. Uncharacteristic, but understandable under the circumstances. ‘On the contrary,’ he countered. ‘You seemed the very opposite of a femme fatale. I thought that you were sweet, and safe. Innocent. Uncomplicated.’
Achingly, she noted his use of the past tense.
‘Until that night. When we had that celebratory drink.’ He walked back over to the window and stared out unseeingly. ‘I’d only had one drink myself—so I couldn’t even blame the alcohol.’
Blame. He needed someone to blame—and she guessed that someone was her. ‘So I was responsible for your momentaryweakness, was I, Philip?’
He turned around and his face was a blaze of anger. ‘Do you make a habit of getting half-cut and borrowing men’s hotel rooms to sleep it off?’ he ground out, because this had been on his mind for longer than he cared to remember. ‘Do you often take off all your clothes and lie there, just waiting, like every man’s fantasy about to happen?’
‘Is that what you think?’ she asked quietly, even though her heart was crashing against her ribcage.
‘I’m not going to flatter myself that I was the first,’ he said coldly. ‘Why should I? You didn’t act like it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’
His words wounded her—but what defence did she have? If she told him that it had felt like that, for her, then she would come over at best naive, and at worst—a complete and utter liar.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she said, and regretted it immediately. ‘I’m sorry,’ she amended. ‘I shouldn’t be flippant when you’re telling me all this.’
Oddly enough, her glib remark did not offend him. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said heavily. ‘I don’t want to be wrapped up in cotton wool for the rest of my life.’
‘Won’t you tell me the rest?’ she asked slowly, because she recognised that he was not just going to go away. And if he was around in her life—then how could they possibly form any kind of relationship to accommodate their son, unless she knew all the facts? However painful they might be.
He nodded. ‘That night I left you I went straight to the hospital. The day before Carla had moved her fingers slightly and it seemed as if there might be hope.’
She remembered that his mood that day had been almost high. So that had been why. His wife had appeared to be on the road to recovery and he had celebrated life in the oldest way known to man. With her.
‘But Carla lay as still as ever, hooked up to all the hospitalparaphernalia of tubes and drips and monitors,’ he continued.
He had sat beside her and been eaten up with guilt and blame and regret as he’d looked down at her beautiful but waxy lips which had breathed only with the aid of a machine. Carla hadn’t recognised him, or had any idea of what he had done, and yet it had smitten him to the hilt that he had just betrayed his wife in the most fundamental way possible.
His mouth twisted. To love and to cherish. In sickness and in health. Vows he had made and vows he had broken.
He had always considered himself strong, and reasoned and controlled—and the weakness which Lisi had exposed in his character had come as an unwelcome shock to which had made him despise himself.
And a little bit of him had despised her, too.
‘She died a few months later,’ he finished, because what else was there to say? He saw her stricken expression and guessed what had caused it. ‘Oh, it wasn’t as a result of what you and I did, Lisi, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ she admitted slowly. ‘Even though I know it’s irrational.’
Hadn’t he thought the same thing himself? As though Carla could have somehow known what he had done.
