Circles of Fate (19 page)

“My grandmother, you mean. Did she know?”

“I think so, otherwise she would have dismissed my mother. Instead she let her stay and allowed me to be brought up at the Casa Esmeralda.”

“Why did she, I wonder? It doesn't fit in with the action one would expect of a cold, unforgiving woman.”

“Did I forget to say she was proud? Too proud to risk a scandal. Also she had to protect your mother. Inez would have been an impressionable fourteen-year-old at the time. So, taking all things into consideration, your grandmother discreetly spread it around that Pilar had been led astray by a mysterious gentleman visitor. It made Mother sound highly promiscuous, but she couldn't very well object.”

“About the money? Did my grandfather settle a legacy on your mother in his will?”

“He didn't leave a will. His estate went naturally to his next of kin.”

“My mother?”

“No. His wife.”

“But my grandmother predeceased him.”

“I didn't say your grandmother, I said his wife. Enrique Cortez married Pilar Sanchez in a secret ceremony just six months before he died. No, I didn't know that either,” he said, answering the question she didn't ask.

“In that case, how did my mother come to inherit Casa Esmeralda?”

“Well, according to my mother, it was like this. She didn't marry Enrique Cortez for material gain. She told him this and asked him to make a will in favour of Inez. He admitted that his daughter had been preying on his mind and said that if it would please her, he would leave my mother the villa and Inez a sum of money. My mother said she didn't want anything and pointed out that to leave her the villa would give rise to speculation. She was happy in the knowledge that she was married to her senor, but she did not want to make known the fact and dig up the unhappy past. He insisted that he wanted my mother to have something. They arrived at a compromise, deciding Inez should have the villa and my mother sufficient money to rehouse herself.”

“But you said he didn't make a will.”

“He didn't. Apparently he died before there was time. My mother conveyed his wishes to the solicitor and signed papers to allow the villa and its contents to pass to your mother, with just a little of the money. She regretted not being able to do more, but the estate wasn't very large.”

“I see. So in actual fact, Pilar bought back her own house?”

“She didn't see it that way. She was fond of Inez, remember. She wanted her to have her rightful share.”

“I feel I should pay it all back.”

“You'd hurt my mother's feelings if you did.”

“What ought I to do?”

“Go home. Forget,” he told her.

“What about us?”

“I see you haven't properly taken it in,” he said on a note of bleak wistfulness. “Fate has played a cruel trick on us. We met, we fell in love. Perhaps it wasn't love at that. Perhaps we mistook affection for the natural affinity one feels for one's own kin. There can be no
us
in the sense that you mean. Later, we might feel able to get in touch, meet, talk about it unemotionally, laugh even. You might bear me in mind when you come to choose the godfather for your firstborn. It is a privilege, I understand, sometimes conferred upon the brother of the girl's mother.”

“Oh ... I ... Oh!”

No use dwelling on the torture of Anita's thoughts. The numbness, deeper than tears, which she wore like a protective cloak to carry her through the next few days.

She cabled Edward that she was coming home and he met her at the airport. If he was surprised at her speedy return, he didn't show it. Neither did he comment on her changed appearance.

Her features hadn't changed but instead of warm flesh, the rounded cheek with its hint of babyish charm, the classic structure of her nose and the feminine fullness of her lips could have been chiselled out of chill marble. And her neck seemed suddenly too slender to support the coil of hair at its nape.

He didn't take her back to her own flat, instead he took her to Cathy's, even though Cathy's temporary habitation was for cramped and inconvenient living. They would have to double-up in closeness and he felt this could only be good for Anita. He didn't know what had brought her hurrying back with pain-whipped eyes. No doubt in time her tongue would unlock. Meanwhile, Cathy was wonderful. She abandoned her own wedding preparations, indefinitely postponing the date until happier times, and gave herself unstintingly to Anita. An ill-used Anita who did nothing to deserve or warrant the friendship and who returned every kindness with a cold rebuff.

During that period, Cathy had unlimited patience and the skin of a seal, emerging from Anita's frequent bouts of ill-humour sleek and unruffled, shaking off stabs and criticisms like drops of water.

Spring arrived and, overnight it seemed, there was a delicate rush of tender green shoots and the colours of spring, the greens, the yellows, the violets and mauves, had a soothing effect. All this time Anita hadn't been able to talk about it. Every time she tried she choked on a feeling of revulsion. Innocent as she was, she felt soiled, guilty of an indecently outrageous act.

One morning she woke up feeling hungry. It was an egg, bacon and toast morning, a getting up and going morning. A morning for doing, not for dozing about in listless abstraction.

“Cathy, how on earth have you put up with me all these weeks?” Overriding her friend's interruption. “Don't deny anything. I have been a beast.”

“Past tense? Can I have that in writing?” said Cathy jovially.

Anita was better. She told her sad little tale to Cathy and Edward. Then she set about catching up on living. She re-established contact with Fleur Fraser, the student teacher who had stood in for her that time she was called to the telephone, and Fleur introduced her to her own circle of friends. Among them was a man called Steve Rawcliffe.

She could never entirely lose the trend of her own thoughts. Sometimes, after a day of fighting back remembrance, it came rolling in with the darkness of evening, a total blackness unrelieved by street lamps or stars. It was always worse at night.

At first she wasn't interested in Steve for himself. She took him like taking an aspirin to counteract a particularly bad headache, accepting his company in preference to the memories that would not quieten. Steve was different from the other men she met. They grew tired of her blank indifference and quickly transferred their attentions to someone more responsive. Steve, on the other hand, was more than a little intrigued and yielded to a whim to arouse her from her lethargy and restore the warmth of character that had once been there.

On the face of it, he succeeded. Her lassitude diminished and she began to rush around, as though she had to burn up all the energy she had been saving. In gratitude to Steve she smiled warmly on greeting him and reluctantly at parting and, although he wasn't the world's most patient man, it was enough for the time being.

Only someone who had known her before could know that she was putting on a brave act and feigning happiness. There was no repose in her these days. Her hands were rarely still and her head would turn suddenly as if she expected someone to be at the door, and there would be a bright gleam of expectancy in her seeking eyes, which faded when the door remained closed.

When she had recounted her sad little tale, Edward could have told her something which would have sent her flying straight back like a giddy moth. The fact that he didn't showed a tremendous strength of character. The time, he felt, wasn't right. Anita wasn't thinking sanely, but riding on the razor edge of her own emotions. At that time she wouldn't have married the man, but her own romantic concept.

He had to admit that the Spaniard fellow, as he persisted in calling him, cut a dashing figure of intense young manhood. He'd asked Cathy, whose emotions he considered to be basically stable, to give him the womanly low-down. She had closed her eyes and replied dreamily: “It's his eyes, I think. They put one in mind of a sleeping volcano.”

“Sounds darned uncomfortable,” he had said testily.

“Yes, dear.” Her eyes had flown open and she had snuggled up close to him on the sofa, blowing him kisses on the air. “He's not my type. And you are absolutely right, Edward, my love. Sleeping volcanoes are heavenly to view on a sightseeing expedition, and the slight element of danger adds to the spice, but they must be darned uncomfortable to live with. Anita is better off without him.”

He had snatched at that. “Do you think so?”

He felt better afterwards. Asking Cathy's opinion had been an antidote for a niggling conscience.

It wasn't something he could put off telling Anita indefinitely. The longer he put it off, the worse it would get, and there was always the danger of her finding out. He ringed a date on the calendar. By then she would be emotionally sound. That day arrived.

“I have something to tell you, Anita.”

Cathy's own private antenna was working. She knew it was important without having to be told.

“Perhaps I should make myself scarce?” she suggested.

“No, Cathy, stay. You are close enough to Anita for her not to mind your hearing. Your presence might even help.” Turning to Anita, he said: “It's something you should have been told long ago. Inez should have told you. She denied you this knowledge for reasons of pride, I think. I'm going back to the time when you were a tiny baby, the time when the last coach of the train in which Inez and three others were travelling, was derailed. Inez was the only one to be carried out alive. But she didn't get off scot-free. She was in hospital for many weeks, suffering from internal injuries. They did their best, but in the end she had to be told that she would never be able to bear a child. That almost broke her heart. She couldn't accept the fact that she would never be able to hold her own baby in her arms.”

Into Anita's mind's eye sprang a clear picture of her mother weeping in anguish over a baby's bootee. She looked at Edward helplessly, and for the first time she spoke the words she thought every time memory replayed this incident.

“But she had me. I was her baby.”

“No, Anita. Inez was pregnant with her baby at the time of the crash. She lost it.”

“Then whose baby was I?”

“Do you remember who else was in the carriage at the time?”

“Yes. I've been told often enough. There was my father and a married couple who were strangers to my parents. A Sheila and John Masters who were your sister and her husband.”

“That's right,” he said gently. “John had just collected my sister from hospital. That's why they were travelling on that train. They had had to leave their baby in hospital because she had failed to gain her birth weight. They were sad at having to leave her, but happy and excited that she was here, small but perfect, and they'd been told there was every possibility of her being allowed home the following weekend.”

“I was that baby?” Her voice was thick and only slightly less incredulous than her eyes. Absently her fingers found a loose strand of hair to worry.

“I tried to tell you once. The time I gave you my sister's, your mother's, ring. But you misunderstood.” Edward went on talking, carefully picking his way, but he was aware of her inner withdrawal. She had stopped tormenting her hair and her fingers tightly gripped his, vainly trying to hold on to feelings of warmth and friendship and understanding, yet mentally she had turned abruptly away from him.

She hated him, as he had been afraid she would, for destroying the whole canvas of her life. It were as if she had painstakingly worked a picture: the seconds, minutes, hours, years of her life were mounted in a series of exquisite stitches, and her handicraft teacher had just told her, ‘Very nice, dear. But you've been working on the wrong canvas. This is yours.' And she was being shown a blank canvas.

She didn't want it. She rejected it fiercely. No, no, I'm Anita Hurst. Inez was my mother. She eloped with a young Englishman who was my father. My grandparents were Enrique and Maria Cortez.

In those first few moments it did not occur to her that Edward wasn't taking away her past, no one can do that, but was giving her a new future.

The sense of reality was still lacking, but now Edward was easing her back, making her look at the blank canvas, only it wasn't blank any more because his words were stitching in names, a background, events.

“John and Sheila Masters were short on relatives and what few they had were widely scattered. John had one brother in Scotland and two in America. Sheila had an aunt in Cornwall and a cousin in Wiltshire. Our parents had died, within months of each other, the previous year. John's parents, who have since died, weren't well enough to take on a new baby. That left me. I would have managed, somehow. I wouldn't have let you go into an orphanage, there was never any question of that. When Inez said she wanted to adopt you, my feelings were mixed and, believe me, I didn't let you go without an inner mental struggle. Without putting any pressure to bear, the doctors at the hospital said it would be the best thing out for Inez. They'd healed her body, but they could do nothing for the wounds that were psychological. They said that a new baby would ease the pain and help her accept her barrenness. This, as you may have gathered from your own observations, was almost impossible in Inez's case. She was a very feminine sort of person who, in the normal run of things, wouldn't have been content with less than six children to fuss over. She gave you all the love she would have given the six children she wasn't lucky enough to have, but she never came to terms with her own physical disability. She never married again because, for her, there was no purpose in marriage without children. Perhaps this was a thought transmitted from her own mother, who had also not been as fruitful as she would have wished. She had witnessed the despair and devastation of her parents' marriage because of this same problem, had seen her mother freeze away from her father and her heart had ached for both of them. She felt she was too much her mother's daughter to remarry and risk someone else's happiness. In her heart she knew that her mother's treatment of her father had been inhuman and wrong, and she didn't want to cause the same distress and humiliation to any man. A great pity, because I do not think that Inez was meant to walk alone. I remember saying to her, ‘But what about your happiness?' But I couldn't budge her. Strange that, because she wasn't without courage.”