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‘When,’ she asked, ‘will you need my answer?’
‘The sooner the better.’
She nodded and stood up, and he followed suit, collecting his various files and stacking them into his briefcase. He had come well-prepared. Statistics had been shown her, profit and loss columns had been methodically pointed out, budgets analysed, and he had been right: she knew very little about finance. In time, she was sure, she could get to grips with it, but ‘in time’ might not be soon enough, and she knew that it would have broken her father’s heart to witness the dissolution of his beloved company. Better for it to carry on in a different form. Wasn’t it?
She showed Mr Clark out, looked in on her mother, who had fallen into a fitful sleep on the chair, and then retreated to the library to think.
It was so hard being strong, she thought wearily. Decisions had to be made and her mother, she knew, was in no fit state to make them.
Isobel sat back in the leather swivel chair and closed her eyes. Memories were the worst. Her father sitting her on his knee when she was a child, going for walks with her, patiently telling her about the various plants and trees in the garden.
She didn’t sob like her mother. The tears squeezed themselves out, but she didn’t brush them away. They fell on to her hands, on her lap, her dress.
That dreamlike feeling of unreality which had first dogged her had gone. Now she could think of the policeman at the door, breaking the news to them that there had been a car accident, that both occupants had been killed outright, without trying to convince herself that she would wake up at any moment and find that it had only been a terrible nightmare.
Jeremy had been at the wheel of the Jaguar. He had been overtaking another car and had been hit by an oncoming lorry. He had been over the limit.
She had tried very hard, but bitterness towards him had overlaid any pain she might have felt. He had ruined her life.
The following morning she telephoned Mr Clark and told him to go ahead with the sale of the company.
‘You have my trust in this matter, Mr Clark,’ she said down the line. ‘I will sign whatever needs signing, but I want no involvement beyond that.’
Her mother was out for the day, taken under wing by Jeremy’s mother, who had been distraught at the funeral but over the past weeks had been a source of strength to Mrs Chandler. They were going to have tea in one of the coffee-shops in the village.
That left Isobel on her own, and she made her way back to her own house. Ever since the accident she had been living with her mother, and it had been something of a relief.
The house she had shared with Jeremy, even after four years of marriage, had never felt like a home. She had looked after the gardens, arranged flowers in vases, hung paintings, but it had still remained a stiff, empty shell. A house could never become a home without love to fill it, and love was something that had been conspicuous by its absence.
She pushed open the front door, stooped down to collect the dribs and drabs of mail, and then, unemotionally, she resumed her sporadic job of packing Jeremy’s clothes into boxes which she had retrieved from the attic. She should have done it sooner, weeks ago, but time had flown past so quickly.
Suits, ties, trousers, jumpers, shirts. She would give them all to charity.
It had all been so pointless. She could remember being twenty, being in love, Lorenzo. Her throat constricted. Of course that had been another life, and she had got over him. Time healed everything; that much was true.
She hadn’t even had the reminder of his mother, because Mrs Cicolla had emigrated to America to be with her son three years previously.
She could still remember that dead, sickly feeling that had spread over her when he had announced at the wedding, not to her but to her parents, that he had decided to emigrate.
‘Within a fortnight,’ he had said casually, his hand in his pocket, his eyes not looking at her at all, eliminating her from his life in one fell swoop. Ex-lover with another man’s ring on her finger. No longer worth so much as token politeness.
That had been four years ago, but the memory was as clear as if it had been only yesterday, only a few hours ago.
She heard the buzz of the doorbell and ran down the stairs to answer it. Abigail. Isobel’s face broke into a smile of pure joy. She hadn’t seen Abigail, apart from briefly at the funeral three months ago.
‘I tried your mum’s house first,’ Abigail said, coming inside, ‘and when there was no reply, I thought that you might be here.’ She looked sympathetically at Isobel. ‘Do you need a hand with anything?’
They went upstairs and continued boxing the clothes, chatting. Abigail’s status, in the space of only a few years, had reached mammoth proportions. She was in the newspapers all the time, her movements shadowed and faithfully, or unfaithfully, reported back on.
‘How’s your mum coping?’ she asked casually, and Isobel paused to look at her.
‘Not very well,’ she answered truthfully. ‘She seems to have retreated into herself.’
‘It’s understandable.’
‘She doesn’t even venture out into the garden. She says every blade of grass reminds her of him.’
Abigail didn’t say anything for a while. ‘And you, Izzy?’ She looked away and busied herself with stuffing more clothes into boxes. Jeremy had had a lot of clothes. He had liked dressing the part of the wealthy landowner.
‘He’s in my mind,’ Isobel said in a low voice.
‘And Jeremy?’
Isobel stood up, dusted herself down and replied shortly, ‘You know that he caused the accident. The coroner told me that in privacy. I asked him if he could withhold the information from his parents, and from Mum.’
‘You always hated him, didn’t you?’
‘No.’ Isobel thought about it, for the first time putting into words what had never been said before. ‘He trapped me into marriage, and please don’t ask me how or why.’ Those papers. She frowned. Where were they? He must have hidden them somewhere. They could not have vanished into thin air. Oh, no. He would never have been so careless as to misplace them—after all, they were the stick to be waved over her if ever she thought of desertion. ‘Of course I hated him to start with, but you can’t hate forever. It’s too tiring. After a while, the instinct for self-preservation takes over or else you would just go mad.’ She shrugged and they went down to the kitchen to have some coffee.
It helped having someone to talk to. It made her co-ordinate her thoughts, and Isobel found herself telling Abigail about Mr Clark’s offer, what she intended to do with her house, her job.
‘I might even contemplate finding out whether I can’t complete some kind of medical course, take it up,’ she said, blushing. ‘Richard thinks it’s a good idea.’
‘Richard?’ Abigail’s eyebrows quirked. ‘Dr Adams, you mean?’
‘He’s very encouraging.’
‘And, so that’s how the land lies.’
‘Of course not!’ Isobel laughed. ‘You and that dramatic mind of yours! Richard and I are simply good friends. He’s been kind to me over the years.’
And they left it at that. Abigail departed late that evening and Isobel returned to find her mother in better spirits than she had been for weeks.
‘Emily is helping me to put everything in perspective, the dear woman,’ she said, sipping tea and picking bits of salad from her plate like a choosy bird deliberating over which morsels to consume. ‘David is gone, and hiding myself away isn’t going to change that. I’ve spent too long hiding. I want to start thinking about tomorrow. What did Mr Clark say?’
So Isobel told her, and the following morning, by some uncanny coincidence, he telephoned to inform her that the purchaser had arrived and would she come down to his offices on the High Street to sign some bits of paper.
Isobel dressed carefully for the occasion. A sober grey wool suit, because the chill of autumn was in the air, her pearls, cream-coloured shoes.
She looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a twenty-four-year-old woman, nearly twenty-five, who, in the midst of loss, now found herself on the brink of freedom for the first time in four long years.
She smiled, and the image smiled back, showing her what she hadn’t seen for a very long time. The same stunning face, but with the black hair trimmed to a bob, a tall, lithe body, eyes that were a little sad, as though they had seen too much.
She swept out of the house, feeling better than she had done for a while, and arrived at Mr Clark’s offices well in time.
Mr Squires wasn’t there. Isobel drank coffee, made small talk to the accountant, and began to feel slightly annoyed that she was being kept waiting. Hadn’t this man heard of common politeness?
She glanced at her watch and caught Mr Clark’s eye. He was looking worriedly at his own watch. Presently he stood up, and said that he would go and have a look to see what had happened to the gentleman in question.
‘Perhaps he’s lost,’ he volunteered politely, to which she was tempted to point out that he could only have found himself lost in a town the size of theirs if he was a mental incompetent, in which case was she really doing the right thing by selling him her father’s company?
He vanished out of the room and ten minutes later, having quietly convinced herself that Mr Squires, the invisible man, was definitely not in the running as a prospective buyer for the company, she heard the door being pushed open.
She automatically looked around.
The shock she felt on seeing Lorenzo Cicolla standing in the doorway was as great as if she had looked out of the window and casually seen a mushroom cloud hanging over the town, announcing nuclear war.
He strolled into the room, not taking his eyes off her face, and she stood up, drained of colour. She was shaking, trembling like a leaf, like someone who had seen a ghost. Her mind felt as though it was being bombarded by so many images, so many feelings, that any minute it would shut down from overload.
‘Lorenzo Cicolla! What are you doing here? I’m expecting a Mr Squires—he should be here any moment. You’re not Mr Squires,’ was all she managed to get out, which was an achievement since her vocal cords appeared to have deserted her.
She had never expected to see Lorenzo Cicolla again. He had been the stick of dynamite thrown into her young life, blowing it to pieces, and those pieces had never successfully been put together again. But still, she had relegated him to the past. She had locked that haunting image into a safe room and she had tried damned hard never to open the door.
What was he doing here?
‘No,’ Lorenzo agreed smoothly, unsmiling, his pale eyes assessing her with arrogant thoroughness. ‘I’m not, am I?’
He sat down in the chair next to her and crossed his legs, and she wished desperately that she could stop staring but she couldn’t. It had been a long time.
The passage of time showed itself in the tiny lines by his eyes and mouth, the hardness of his features, but apart from that she might have been staring at the Lorenzo of old. He had the same terrifying sex-appeal, the same dark, brooding good looks.
‘I apologise for staring,’ Isobel said stiltedly, ‘but I can’t believe that it’s really you, sitting there.’ She threw him a tentative smile which met with a blank wall.
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ he said abruptly, looking away. ‘I’m afraid the news was rather late in reaching me.’
‘Thank you. Yes. It was a tragic accident.’ Platitudes were becoming easier to mouth. No one felt comfortable with raw emotion and she had learned to control her responses to the polite condolences of neighbours and people in the village.
‘And of course, Jeremy.’
‘Thank you. Of course.’
‘What exactly happened?’
She shrugged and her fingers nervously plucked her wool skirt. ‘The car went out of control. There was a lorry coming in the opposite direction. Jeremy was killed outright. My father——’ she paused and took a deep, stabilising breath ‘—died in the ambulance.’
‘How is your mother coping with it?’
‘Why are you here?’ It was easier to ask that now that she had recovered some of her self-control.
He smiled coolly, and she could see dislike and contempt lurking beneath the surface. It made her blood run cold. ‘Surely we aren’t yet finished with the preliminaries, are we, Isobel? It’s been years—four years to be precise.’
‘Yes. I know. You left this town without a backward glance, Lorenzo.’ Her heart was still beating irregularly and she had the strangest feeling of having stepped into a mad, nonsensical world, like Alice in Wonderland. One blink and it would all disappear. She blinked but nothing disappeared, not even the breathless tension gripping her lungs, making breathing laborious and difficult.
He shrugged. ‘I always knew that I would return, when the time was right.’
‘And why is the time right now?’
‘Because, my dear, I am about to buy your father’s company.’
‘You!’ She looked at him in stunned silence. ‘But Mr Clark said…He told me…’
‘That Mr Squires was interested. Yes. Mr Squires was interested, on my behalf.’
She stood up and began pacing the room, while Lorenzo remained where he was, watching her, his face revealing nothing.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said at last, standing in front of him but not too close, because something about him was vaguely menacing. Had this been the same man who had fired her passions once upon a time? Surely not!
‘I have never been more serious about anything in my entire life.’
‘But why?’
His lips thinned. ‘Because I like the beauty of the wheel that turns full circle.’
‘Revenge, Lorenzo?’ she whispered incredulously.
‘Oh, revenge is too strong a word.’
‘Then why my father’s company?’
‘It poses an interesting challenge,’ he drawled, but the lazy cruelty was still there in his voice and in the rigid lines of his face.
‘And the fact that my father owned it has nothing to do with it?’
‘A little, I suppose.’ He shrugged dismissively, although his eyes never left her face, not for a second. ‘Besides, I’ve become tired of city life. Chicago has lost its appeal. It will be nice returning here for a while.’ ‘You’ll be coming back here to live?’
‘But of course. What else did you expect?’
Not that. Anything but that, Isobel thought. Four years ago they had parted in anger and bitterness. Words had been spoken, things said…She stifled the memory of her disastrous wedding-day, that awful confrontation in the garden, before he had walked out of her life forever. Had he simply been biding his time until an opportunity such as this arose, or had the death of Jeremy and her father rekindled buried feelings of anger?
‘You don’t look too thrilled with the prospect,’ he said, eyebrows raised, his mouth curling with a hint of cynicism.
‘Of course, it will be nice to see you…’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Don’t lie, Isobel. Your face is too transparent.’
She flushed angrily. ‘What do you want me to say? You walk back into town after four years and announce that you plan on settling here, but there’s nothing pleasant about the announcement, is there? You’re not planning on settling here for the good of the community. You’re planning on settling here because you have a chance to settle old scores.’ She looked at him bitterly. ‘Aren’t we both too old for this?’
He banged his fist on the table with such force that Isobel jumped and looked at him warily. He wasn’t going to get violent, was he? Then she laughed nervously to herself. Of course not. How could he in such a public place? Besides, she knew Lorenzo. He had never been a man given to displays of violence.
You don’t know him now, though, a little voice warned. People change. The face she was staring at with apprehension was the face of a stranger, a dark, menacing stranger.
‘Too old?’ he sneered. ‘Too old to forget the past, Isobel?’
‘What happened happened a long time ago…’ She glanced at the door and he followed the line of her eyes with a cold smile.
‘Mr Clark has been told to wait until I am ready.’
‘What?’
