Darling Sweetheart (45 page)

‘I thought I’d let you sleep.’ He smiled, but she didn’t answer. He nodded at Froggy. ‘I see you’ve still got our little friend.’ He was as nervous as she was – worse, perhaps.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘I still have Froggy.’

He jammed his hands into the pockets of a pair of denim shorts. A white T-shirt covered sloping shoulders and a distinct pot belly. He wore small, frameless spectacles and his skin was a leathery brown – she thought of photos she’d once seen, of the older, satyr-like Picasso.

‘How did you know?’ he asked.

‘I… I didn’t know.’ Her mind flashed like a stroboscope. In a café in Beynac, late at night, a pair of drunken extras, chatting up the local girls. He’d even shouted after her, ‘Coo-eee! Annaliiise! Coo-eee!’ Then, on a balcony above the Chemin du
Château, wearing silly underwear and a droopy moustache. She’d even wished him good morning, but he hadn’t answered. Then, on Beynac Castle ramparts, the day of the stunt. The diseased old beggar – ‘Pick me! Pick meee!’ The traffic warden outside Goddards’, talking to Ben. He’d been right behind her all the time, while she was frantically searching… no! The bloody ticket collector on the train! God in sodding heaven! How had she not…?

‘I didn’t know,’ she pointed at her forehead, ‘up here. But I must have known,’ now she pointed at her heart, ‘down here.’

He took a few steps closer. He was smaller than she remembered and almost bald, although the hair was still thick on his arms. His face had pouched; only his eyes still seemed to belong to him, with their deep, sad brown. He opened his arms slightly, but she didn’t step off the deck.

‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’

‘You callous bloody bastard,’ she mumbled, ‘you callous, selfish bloody bastard… the roses: that was you, wasn’t it? You were mocking me! Standing right in front of me, mocking me! How could you do that?’

He assumed a pained expression. ‘You know, the past few years have been very difficult for me too, watching from afar as my little girl grows into this beautiful, successful woman, and I can’t hug her and tell her how proud I am.’

‘Well,’ her mouth was dry, ‘I imagine that would be one of the problems with being dead… wouldn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry, I truly am,’ and now his face was a masterpiece of contrition, ‘but if you’d just let me explain…’

She guffawed.
‘Explain?’

He gestured at the trees. ‘Come up to the house. We can talk there.’

‘Where’s Ben?’

He waved vaguely. ‘Off skulking somewhere, afraid you’ll never speak to him again.’

‘He could be right about that.’

‘I’m pretty cross with him myself, actually, for taking advantage of my daughter when he knew fine well that it was his job to look after you. I have a good mind to–’

‘Hey!’ She held a hand up. ‘Before you start with the Daddy stuff – what makes you think that I want to talk to you, either?’

‘Because,’ and to her utter surprise, he opened his arms and sang, ‘Call me darling, call me sweetheart, call me dear…’ and now she didn’t know whether to leap off the boat and physically attack him or just to cry, so she did neither. ‘By the way,’ he grinned and pointed, ‘I dig the dress. Very Ella.’

‘It’s a memento of the film you’ve just ruined, probably the last job I’ll ever be offered.’

‘Your heart wasn’t in it – I could tell.’

‘So you decided to wreck it on me?’

‘You can’t blame me for that! You know yourself that
The Pefect Heresy
is going to be an absolute disaster; that idiot Emerson is wrecking it all by himself. You did the right thing, walking away from it!’

‘If you’re so bloody clever, then what were
you
doing there?’

He shrugged. ‘Because that’s what I do, nowadays. Scraps of extra work, here and there. Usually shoots that Ben’s contracted on – I travel incognito, as you can imagine.’

‘Actually, I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what goes on in your…’ Another thought occurred to her. ‘Wait a minute, are you and Ben…?’

‘Gay lovers? No. We fight enough as it is, without bringing sex into it.’

‘Were you?’

‘Why can’t a man and a man just be friends without everyone assuming–’

‘Because you never had any friends.’

‘True,’ he nodded, ‘and that was one of the many things wrong with my life before I… you know, before I…’

‘Abandoned your only child?’

‘Well…’

‘Or do you have news for me on that front, too?’

‘You’re being silly, now.’

‘Sorry,’ she spat the words, ‘I can’t imagine why such a fucked-up notion would even occur to me!’

‘All right, all right! No, I have no secret family here, if that’s what you mean; no litter of little Davids to mess the place up; no native squaw women heavy with child. But I do have a nice, cool verandah where you can be as furious as you like. Come on – it’s too hot out here.’ Beckoning, he walked into the trees. She paused, as if undecided, but curiosity was slowly overcoming shock, so she stepped onto the pier and followed him up a steep forest path, where crickets buzzed like faulty lightbulbs and green-brown lizards wiggled up the tree trunks.

‘Where are we? What is this place?’

He threw a crafty smile over his shoulder. ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.’

‘You won’t have to kill me because, on the inside, I’m dying from laughter.’

‘Come up here,’ he pointed ahead, ‘and see for yourself.’

He was, she noticed, quite short of breath by the time the path broke through the trees. Before them, squatting snugly on a natural terrace in the hillside, was a solid two-storey stone house of an old design; small windows with heavy green shutters and a shallow, brown-tiled roof. Two modern intrusions jarred: a dusty jeep parked in a nearby shed and an enormous white satellite dish outside the front door, angled at the sky. Cables ran from the base of this into the house.

‘Now,’ he waved an arm, ‘where do you think you are?’

The façade was in shadow, so she reckoned the house must be facing roughly north. She turned around, and the view nearly flattened her. A vast, powder-blue sea melded into a distant heat haze; above her on both sides, dramatic yellow cliffs tilted into
crags, before plunging almost vertically downwards. Scrub and grass clung on where they could, but it was as if God had cracked a piece of the earth’s crust and left it as a testament to His might.

‘No one else around,’ he smiled, ‘just how I like it. But about six miles in that direction,’ he pointed west, ‘is a charming spot called Porto de Soller, and beyond that, Deia, which you may have heard of because all sorts of famous people tend to holiday there. Although,’ he laughed, ‘we don’t socialise, not as ourselves, anyway. I do sometimes pretend to be a stupid British tourist.’

‘Mallorca,’ she breathed. ‘I thought Mallorca was all tower-blocks and stag parties…’

‘Well as you can see, it’s not. Not the north side, anyway. Some of the resorts are a bit tacky, but people are always surprised to find large parts of the island still unspoiled.’ About a mile out to sea, a yacht inched by. ‘And we picked a nice tricky cove with plenty of underwater rocks – mostly, the daytrippers don’t try to get into it.’

‘How long have you had this place?’

He showed her around to the side of the house, where a long verandah was shaded by pink bougainvillea.

‘A few years.’

‘How long?’

‘Since the mid-nineties, but I had a lot of work done to it.’

‘You’d been planning it for ages, hadn’t you?’

He offered her a seat at a rustic wooden table. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Beer.’

‘Beer.’

He shuffled off through a patio door. She heard a fridge open and he returned with two frosty bottles. He settled in front of her, his back to the view. She sat Froggy on the table and took a long, cold swallow.

‘Ben says that you talk to it.’ He nodded at Froggy. ‘He says that you pretend it’s a real person. I’m very worried about you, Annalise.’

‘Father,’ she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, ‘it’s just an old stuffed toy. It’s a prop; that’s all.’ Froggy slumped to one side, plastic eyes reflecting the sky.

‘Ah,’ he chortled to himself, ‘I see. Very clever. Just like the old days, eh? You used him to coax me out of my hiding place…’

‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘So the whole thing with Froggy – that was just a performance?’

‘And what do you call this?’ She looked around. ‘Palatine’s great disappearing act?’

‘Okay, touché, touché.’ He sipped his beer. ‘It’s Fealy now, actually. I’ve been reincarnated as David Fealy, retired engineer. David Palatine was a horrible character who went on for too long, before I finally summoned the courage to kill him off.’

‘How incredibly brave of you.’

‘Look, I can see why you might be bitter–’

‘Full of fatherly understanding, as well as brave.’

‘Annalise–’

‘Who else knows?’

He sighed. ‘No one, apart from Ben. He deals with everything – he’s my representative, out in the world.’

‘Your helper.’

‘My…?’

‘Never mind. How much did you get for Whin Abbey?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘The trust is dealing with that. But we’ll talk about it, I promise.’

‘I don’t want your money – I’m not Leon Miller. I’m just wondering how you fund your idyllic lifestyle with occasional extra work.’

‘Oh, being an extra is just an excuse to get out and about. This is paradise, but I’d go mad if I had to stay here all the time.’

‘Go mad?’

He coughed. ‘The lawyers, uh, manage the trust on my behalf, with Ben as executor.’

‘And every year it pays a nice lump sum into a Spanish bank account, something like that?’

‘Something like that.’

She banged her bottle on the table and he jumped. ‘You let my mother die in poverty!’

He held up a finger. ‘Actually, I didn’t…’

‘You did!’

‘I gave her twenty thousand pounds a year!’

‘She said you gave her nothing!’

‘The trust allowed her to live in the house and sent her money every month! How she spent it was her own concern – largely on vodka, I believe.’

‘She died alone! Alone, at the bottom of the stairs!’

‘I know,’ he winced, ‘and I’m sorry, I really am. But for many years your mother and I simply didn’t–’

‘Alone!’ And now the tears came. ‘At the bottom of the stairs!’ She rubbed her eyes. How odd, a little part of her thought, that she should suddenly feel so upset about her mother. ‘She lay there for days!’

‘Yes, well, neither of us were there when it happened, were we, and unfortunately that’s not something we can go back and–’

‘Don’t!’ She leapt up roaring. ‘Don’t you dare blame me!’ She pushed her chair away, leaving Froggy where he lay. She stormed off across the front of the house, back towards the hillside and the forest track.

‘Annalise!’ he called after her. ‘Annalise!’

But she stomped downward through the pines, cheeks red, eyes burning. The little cove was still empty apart from the boat, and if she’d had any idea how to start or steer the damn thing she’d have untied it and kept on going, just to show him. But, she
realised, there was nowhere to storm off to, so she kicked off her sandals, tore off Roselaine’s dress and threw herself off the pier.

The water was delicious – just cold enough to be refreshing, just warm enough to be comforting. She broke the surface and looked around. Nobody, nothing… just the crickets and the pines and the jagged walls of coloured rock. So to hell with it, she thought, who cares about anything any more? Treading water, she pulled off her underwear, rolled it into a sopping ball and threw it at the pier. Then she lay on her back and drifted, looking up at the cloudless sky. Her skin tautened with the salt, but slowly her fury subsided. Eventually, she rolled over and breast-stroked out of the cove, to where the sea was deeper, darker and, in spite of its calm appearance, had a bit of a swell. Gargantuan boulders frothed the surface like barnacled icebergs, nine-tenths of their bulk underwater. You would, indeed, need to know what you were doing, she thought, to steer a boat through here.

‘I’d be careful, if I were you. The currents can be deceptive.’

The voice was close, almost at her shoulder. She thrashed, her first thought to cover her nudity, but grabbing at herself was hardly conducive to staying afloat. He was sitting on a jumble of rocks, just around from the mouth of the cove. She swam behind a sunken boulder, held onto it and peeked out.

‘It’s okay,’ he smiled, ‘I can’t see anything… well, not much, anyway. You look like a mermaid.’

‘So this is where you’re hiding.’ She frowned. ‘Are you afraid I’m going to box your ears?’

‘Aye, a bit. I’m sorry, I truly am.’

‘Everyone I meet today is sorry. It doesn’t change the fact that the pair of you have been stringing me along – never mind the past two weeks, what about the past eight years?’

‘I know it can’t be much of a comfort, but he’s been in absolute bits for a long time, wondering how on earth to tell you.’

‘So why not just tell me? Why not ring, write or just walk up to me in the street? Better still, why pretend to die horribly in the first place?’

‘For the last bit, you need to ask him. But as for telling you – would you have been any less shocked or angry if he’d done it another way?’

‘So you thought you’d destroy my career instead?’

‘It was pure coincidence,’ she noticed he spoke carefully, ‘that I got a job on
Heresy
– they were hiring a lot of people. When they announced that you were cast, your father decided to tag along too – but there was no plan, I swear. He was trying to summon the nerve; that’s why he kept surprising you with flowers. It was me who put them in your apartment and your trailer. He said that white roses would stir old memories.’

‘Most of them deeply traumatic.’

‘Call it cack-handed, but he was shaping up to approach you, I swear to Christ he was. He just didn’t know how; I think he was going to wait until you finished filming. But then all that paparazzi shite kicked off, and Emerson took you to London and… well, everything went bonkers. Your father told me to look after you, so I tagged along. And you know the rest.’