After the Honeymoon (32 page)

As soon as they got back to the UK, he vowed, he would put his lawyer onto that journalist. That would teach her to make up tales about some love child.

‘It’s a pack of lies,’ he had said to Melissa as they’d pushed past the journalist on the beach. ‘You know what these people are like. Ignore her.’

‘All right.’ Melissa had nodded uncertainly. ‘See you later in the room. There are a couple of things I need to do first.’

Suddenly, the door flew open. Melissa stood there, her jeans still wet from the boat trip; her dark hair spilling over her shoulders. Her face was different. It looked hurt, like it did when she spoke to Marvyn.

A tremor of apprehension passed through Winston like an electric shock, so powerful that he found his knees buckling.

She knew.

He could just tell.

‘How could you have brought us here?’ she snapped.

This wasn’t what he’d expected. ‘What do you mean?’ he snapped back. ‘If you remember, it was your idea to come here. Not mine.’

‘But you were keen enough, weren’t you? Probably thought it was a great opportunity to introduce me to your son!’ She was hissing now, like a furious cat. There had been cats in Bosnia, he recalled irrelevantly. Cats that had hidden in the caves. He’d stroked one once, soothing its arched back before giving it back to the child who had lost it. It had been no substitute for the parents who were gone but at least it had been something.

‘My son?’ He laughed out loud, dizzy with relief that she had got the wrong end of the stick. For a moment there, he thought she’d discovered the truth about Nick. ‘I don’t have a son, Melissa. What are you talking about?’

Another flash of the eyes. As she came towards him, Winston felt his muscles tighten just as they had before battle. She had him by his collar now, her face so close to his that he could taste her breath. ‘That’s not what Mrs Harrison has just told me. Her son, Jack, is yours. You got her pregnant. When she was seventeen!’

The room around him started to drop away. At the same time, the gymkhana rosettes loomed out of the wall at him. Turning round, he stared at the photograph of the two girls he’d seen before. As if by telepathy, two names formed in his head. Rosemary who loved riding. Rosemary and her friend with the blonde hair. What was she called again? Jenny? Gemma?

No. That was impossible. Or was it?

‘Rosemary,’ he said quietly as though talking to himself. ‘Of course. Rosemary.’

‘So you admit you know her?’ Melissa’s voice was trembling. Too late, he realised she’d expected him to comfort her; tell her that it wasn’t true.

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ As he spoke, he knew he wasn’t making sense. He tried again. ‘I thought Mrs Harrison seemed slightly familiar when we met, but I couldn’t place her.’

Melissa gave a hoarse, slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Well, she can place
you
all right. I overheard our hostess talking about you to her Greek boyfriend.’ She was spitting out the words like hot coals. ‘Turns out that you went out together, when you were training. Don’t deny it, Winston!’

Tears were rolling down her face. ‘Then you went back to your training, leaving her pregnant.’

‘But I didn’t know …’ he tried to say.

‘Don’t come near me.’ She pushed him away. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your lies.’

Winston felt his breath coming out in huge gulps. Rosemary from Devon. He couldn’t even recall her surname. He’d slept with her, certainly. She’d meant a great deal to him at the time – not something he should probably share with Melissa – but then he’d been transferred.

Could she really have got pregnant by him? And then turned up here, Siphalonia, of all places – where he had come for his honeymoon?

Desperately, he tried to get his head straight, though he was stumbling over the words in his distress. ‘If it was the same girl – woman – I didn’t know she was pregnant. You have my word on that. Yes, we went out for a month or so.’ He paused at the bitter-sweet memory. ‘I wrote to her after I left but she didn’t write back.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens in the services. Girls don’t want to wait for you …’

There was another snort. ‘Well, this one did. She tried to find you.’ Melissa made a little choking sound. ‘Jack even
looks
like you.’

Winston felt his stomach tighten.

‘I noticed that, when we arrived,’ Melissa added, her voice cracked with emotion, ‘although I didn’t put two and two together. He has the same eyes. Olive skin. He raises one eyebrow, just like you do. There’s a funny little kink on the side of his ears that you have as well. And he does that thing with his hands that you do when you speak. I’m a make-up artist, Winston. I notice these things.’

Really? He had to confess he hadn’t been so sharp with his observations. His mouth was bone dry. ‘I need to talk to her,’ he said.

Melissa nodded, her eyes shadowed with pain. ‘Yes. I think you do.’

When he went to find her, Rosie was sitting on a big wooden chair in the kitchen, mug of tea in her hands, staring out of the open window towards the sea. It was too dark to see much but there was, he noticed, a small light a long way off. A boat, presumably. Or maybe a flicker of hope in his imagination.

No one else was in the room, thank goodness. He couldn’t have borne trying to explain himself in front of Greco. Or, even worse, Jack.

‘Rosemary?’ he asked quietly, slipping into the chair next to her.

She raised her head and gave him a rueful smile. ‘Charlie?’

He nodded wryly, in acknowledgment. ‘My agent made me change my name. It’s one of the few things in that newspaper series that’s true.’

Instantly, her face tightened. ‘So you think they lied about your so-called love child?’

His knuckles clenched under the table. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. For pity’s sake, Rosemary – Rosie.
You
tell
me
.’

Don’t lay yourself open, he could hear his old commanding officer saying. Don’t invite trouble. Yet somehow he could tell that this woman was genuine.

‘I discovered I was expecting after you’d gone.’ Her hands were shaking, he noticed, and her voice quivering. ‘My friend Gemma came with me to buy the pregnancy test.’ She looked up at him and he suddenly saw the young schoolgirl he had fallen for, hook, line and sinker. ‘I was so scared. You can’t imagine it.’

He couldn’t. But being pregnant and alone at seventeen must have been terrifying. His heart went out to her.

‘I wrote to you,’ she added quietly, ‘but you didn’t reply.’

What?
‘I didn’t get a letter. I promise you. In fact, I wrote to
you
but didn’t hear back.’

Her eyes bored right through him. ‘I didn’t get a letter.’

The two of them stared at each other, neither willing to look away. Both determined to prove they were right.

‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I believe you.’

‘Me too,’ gulped Winston. ‘I’m so sorry. It must have been really tough for you.’

‘Yes and no. But I had Jack, didn’t I? I could never regret that.’

He felt a crushing pang of loss at having missed out on so much.

‘People were very kind, on the whole,’ she added. ‘When I ended up here, a wonderful Greek woman called Cara – who’s listening from the scullery, by the way – took me in.’

He glanced around nervously, aware at the same time that something was missing in her story. ‘Your father. How did he react?’

Her mother, he dimly remembered now, had died during her childhood.

Rosie looked away. ‘Wouldn’t have anything to do with me after I told him I was pregnant. Still won’t.’

That was awful. ‘And Jack? What does he know?’

The boy’s name sounded different now he knew he was his. Rosie’s face softened with what might or might not have been wistfulness.

‘He thinks his father was killed in a motorbike accident.’ Then her mouth tightened. ‘And that’s the way I want it to stay.’

Was she that naive? ‘But supposing someone finds out?’

‘How?’

‘These journalists are scavengers.’

‘They just referred to a love child, not Jack by name. And if they do, I’ll deny it.’ Her voice hardened. ‘I’ll tell him that we went out as teenagers but that was it. I’ll make him believe that the newspapers are lying. Don’t you see, Winston? I don’t want any more to do with you, than you do with us. I’m certainly not after your money.’ She folded her arms. ‘Jack and I have managed perfectly well without you so far, and we can carry on that way.’

This wasn’t what he’d expected. A picture of her son –
their
son – swam into his mind. A nice boy. Well-mannered. Fun. Not boring. Good-looking. ‘You’ve done a great job, Rosie, but a boy needs a father.’

Her chair scraped against the wooden floor as she stood up. ‘There are plenty of male role models here, thank you very much.’

Now it was his turn to leap up. ‘Like your Greek boyfriend, you mean?’

She might be smaller than him – a lot smaller – but she was glaring up at him like someone who had the upper hand. ‘At least Greco can say that he’s known Jack from birth, which is more than you can. Get real, Winston or Charlie or whatever you call yourself now. You can’t just come waltzing into our lives and start to play mummies and daddies after all this time.’

‘But,’ he began and then stopped at the sound of clapping. A very small, wrinkled woman in a faded pink-and-blue cotton pinafore was emerging from what he’d previously assumed was a large cupboard by the side of the sink. ‘My English, she is not very clever, but I comprehend enough.’

The woman slapped him on the back; she was stronger than she looked. ‘Your English gentleman, he is right, Rosie. Your son, he needs to know who hees real father is.’

Rosie’s eyes, he saw to his chagrin, were filling with tears. ‘Not yet. Give me time. This is all too much.’

He could see that. ‘Of course it is,’ he said softly. Part of him wanted to give her a quick cuddle to show he understood. ‘When you’re ready, let me know. I’ll come back here and we’ll sit down for a chat.’

He’d almost said ‘family chat’, but that seemed too presumptuous at this stage. Even so, he felt an excited tingle down his spine. A son! He had a fully formed son, who didn’t need training or taming like Alice and Freddie. Yes, Jack had done a few daft things, but you needed to when you were a boy. On the whole, he was a great lad. A son to be proud of. How ironic, he realised, that he’d discovered this now. If it had been a year ago, when he’d been single, there would have been no problem. No one else to explain it to.

‘I need to talk to my wife,’ he added, finding himself unable to meet either Cara or Rosie’s eyes. ‘I need to tell her everything.’

The old woman had snorted. ‘Good luck.’ Then she had wrung his hands like an old friend. ‘You will need it, I theenk.’

Winston swallowed hard. ‘Yes.’ Then he remembered something. ‘The dress,’ he said, turning back to Rosie. ‘The purple dress you wore the other night for the Greek dancing. It looked familiar.’

His voice trailed away with embarrassment.

Rosie’s eyes met his gratefully. ‘You remembered,’ she whispered.

He closed his eyes briefly as the memory of their first kiss suddenly hit him with such force that he almost keeled over. ‘I didn’t realise I’d forgotten.’

Melissa hadn’t taken it well.

‘Your Rosie Harrison might not want money now,’ she’d snapped when Winston had finished telling her everything, in the room that belonged to his ex. ‘But she might well change her mind later on.’

In vain he tried to point out that Rosie wasn’t ‘his’ but he could feel the jealousy rising off her like steam. He could understand that. Wasn’t he jealous of Marvyn?

‘What about your ex-husband?’ he’d asked. ‘Are you going to tackle him about those lies? He’s more or less implied that I stole you from him before your divorce was finalised.’

‘Leave him to me,’ she’d announced crisply. ‘The same goes for that silly Emma who must have told them about Alice and Jack. I don’t know who else could have done. By the time I’ve finished with her, she won’t have any friends left in Corrywood.’ Her eyes had glittered with anger. ‘Alice is so upset that she says she won’t go back to school.’

Winston shrugged. A change of school might not be a bad thing, especially if it was a long way off. ‘What I don’t understand, is how they know I had a child.’

Melissa snorted. ‘You’re so naive, aren’t you? Whatever you think, I still believe it was
her.
Rosie Harrison. I told you she’d be after money. The paper probably paid her handsomely.’

‘My money’s on your friend Emma.’

‘Maybe.’ Melissa’s eyes had shone with tears. ‘How could this happen to us, Winston? On our honeymoon, too!’

Winston’s mind came back to the present. He couldn’t help noticing that Alice seemed quite buoyant. Doubtless she was delighted that he and her mother had had a massive argument.

‘Hi, Dad,’ she was chirping now into Melissa’s mobile. ‘We’re almost back. Can you come round and meet us?’

Melissa, staring out of the window, didn’t even move. Couldn’t she see that the girl was doing her best to break them up?

‘By the way,’ Melissa said coolly as the taxi drew up outside her house (he still saw it as hers, even though they were married), ‘I meant to ask you something else. Who is Nick Thomas?’

Winston felt as though someone had just punched him in the solar plexus, leaving him writhing on the ground. ‘Why?’ he managed.

Melissa’s eyes narrowed. ‘One of the reporters at the airport mentioned his name.’

His mouth was so dry that he could hardly form a word. ‘What did you say?’

‘That I didn’t know.’ Her gaze hardened. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

‘Sort of.’

She narrowed her eyes again in an
I don’t believe you any more
gesture. ‘Well, we’ll find out in the papers tomorrow. Something else to look forward to, I suppose.’

Trembling with apprehension, Winston paid the driver and watched the kids race out of the car, towards a man lounging against his sleek silver Jaguar, parked in the drive as though he still lived there. ‘Dad, Dad!’

‘Hiya, you lot!’ Marvyn was beaming with malice. ‘Had a good time, did you? Sorry about that crap in the papers, by the way. Some journalist rang me up to ask how I felt about my wife marrying a TV star. I told her I was very happy for you both.’ He grinned again. ‘You know what these journalists are like. They get it all wrong. Not cross with me, are you, Mellie?’