Lord and Master (28 page)

She was so engrossed that when she felt a hand on her shoulder she jumped and fell back on her butt. She looked up to see Stefan and laughed at history repeating itself, scrabbling to her feet and pulling off her helmet. He was still dressed in his work trousers, dress shirt and tie, wearing a leather jacket she hadn't seen before and very much liked on him. Luna cast a quick involuntary glance through the barn doors to be sure there were no witnesses, then noticed the frown on his face. Eager to prove that she was prepared to be less secretive about their relationship, she threw her arms around him, planting a firm kiss on his lips.

‘Hold on a second,' she said, turning to replace the WD40 in the bike seat. She heard the engine cut out and looked to see Stefan removing the key.

‘I thought we agreed you wouldn't be driving this again,' he said, his tone cool.

‘I don't think
we
did,' Luna disagreed, winking at him as she went to fetch the drop cloth from a shelf along the wall. ‘You expressed your opinion on the matter…'

‘Forgive me, but I distinctly recall that we had an agreement,' he insisted.

‘No. You said you didn't want me riding the bike again and I didn't say anything. That doesn't constitute an agreement, Stefan.' She was purposefully mimicking language he'd used against her in a previous argument, poking a bit of fun at him. She pulled the cloth over the bike and continued, ‘I must say, this isn't very Swedish of you. I thought you Swedes were all about equality of the sexes…' She trailed off, too late realising that she had misread this exchange; Stefan was genuinely displeased with her.

‘So my view on the matter doesn't mean anything to you,' he said.

‘Not when it's completely irrational.'

He shook his head angrily. ‘There's nothing irrational about not wanting the woman I love to take stupid risks.'

‘Would you listen to yourself?' she said incredulously. ‘I'd like to hear what you'd say to me if you'd…' she groped for a suitable comparison, ‘you'd taken a tumble on the ski slopes or something and I insisted you stopped skiing.'

‘That isn't the same and yes, if I'd almost killed myself—'

‘Oh for fuck's sake. I didn't almost kill myself. I dislocated my shoulder, something I have done before playing lacrosse. Would you like me to swear off lacrosse too?' She picked up her helmet. Really, this evening wasn't panning out at all as she had hoped. She tried again in a more reasonable tone. ‘Look, anyone who drives a motorbike is eventually going to come off. It's just a statistical likelihood. And I was lucky—'

‘Exactly. You were lucky, Luna. What if you aren't as lucky next time?'

Now
she
was becoming angry. ‘I refuse to be treated like a child who doesn't know what's best for her,' she said firmly, holding out her hand to him for her key, which was still dangling between his fingers.

In response, Stefan closed his fist around it. Luna looked at him. And he looked at her. She realised they were at a stalemate and suddenly she was too furious to stand in that barn with him for another second. Nodding her head curtly as if to say
fine, keep it,
she turned on her heel and started walking out of the barn.

‘Oh, that's right, walk away,' came Stefan's voice from behind her, mocking her. ‘Just like you always do when things become difficult. Anything rather than stay and talk it through.'

‘There's nothing to talk about,' she fired back over her shoulder. ‘I don't take orders from you. You're not my father.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No I'm not.'

Luna stopped dead. She turned around to face him, adrenaline beginning to pump through her veins. He was staring at her, not giving an inch, and her body went cold as she stared back at him.
Go on then,
she challenged him.

‘Because if I
were
your father, if I'd been entrusted with something as precious as you, I would never have left you…'

Luna felt the walls of the barn closing in on her.

‘And I sure as hell wouldn't have done it by jumping in front of a train while you watched me—'

‘You don't know anything about it,' Luna began vehemently.

‘—just to make absolutely sure that I completely fucked my daughter up for the rest of her life—'

Luna made a strangled noise and sliced her hand through the air. ‘You don't get to talk about him.
Ever
.' She reeled away from him, walking swiftly out of the barn.

She spent the next half hour pacing the floor of her sitting room, her anger swiftly giving way to agitation. So he knew. He knew the truth about her father's death, or a version of the truth. She wondered how he had found out; it had been reported as an accident at the time and of her current intimates only the Marchioness and Nancy were privy to this information. Luna was certain that neither of them would have told him. But it wouldn't have been impossible to piece together, not for someone determined to find out.

It didn't matter anyway, how he'd found out. What mattered was that he knew and that, as she had feared, it tainted his view of her. And it was worse, even, than he knew.

Stellaluna, her parents had named her. But in truth, it was her mother who was the stars and moon and entire galaxy of their little family. When her father met her at age twenty-three, her just nineteen and, she later told Luna, ‘completely innocent, never been kissed', he had been thunderstruck. A life that had previously been lonely and troubled suddenly seemed to have been a necessary journey that had brought him to her, his Emily.

To Luna, growing up listening to the story of their brief courtship and inevitable union, her parents' love had been the foundation upon which her early life had been built. And she in turn had been loved, by her mother surely and certainly. By her father too, in his own way, as a sort of mini version of her mother; a ‘package deal', as he'd once joked, walking down a street in Newbury with the two of them, one hand in Emily's and the other in Luna's.

He spent much of Luna's childhood travelling for work, much in demand as a session musician equally skilled at playing guitar, piano, drums and no less than three brass instruments. At the time Lukas Gregory first met Emily Radcliffe, he had even been something of a singer-songwriter, though he gave this up after they married, having found happiness with her and being constitutionally unsuited, at any rate, for life in the spotlight. No, he said, he was fine with things as they were, with Emily and their little star to come home to.

So it was just Luna and Mummy, most of the time, and sometimes Daddy too. No one else, for Emily had been brought up in care and had no family to speak of, and Lukas was estranged from his mother, a Czech immigrant who had taken one look at Emily when her son brought her for a visit and said, ‘No.' Whereupon Lukas had reached for his wife's hand and walked straight out of her house.

From then on, they seemed to decide that they were sufficient unto each other. ‘Just us and you, chicken,' her mother used to say, cuddling Luna close and kissing her forehead. True, Luna sometimes wished for a brother or sister, someone special just for her – particularly when her father and mother sat staring into each other's eyes at the kitchen table and she knew she was invisible to them, or to him at least – but she made sure never to articulate her wishes. Because above all Luna loved her mother, and wanted to be loved by her father.

And if this all sounded a little sad, a little tragic, well, Luna didn't see it that way. Not at the time, or after. It was just the way of their family. The tragedy started when she arrived home from school one afternoon to find a police car in front of the house and her father inside, sitting at the kitchen table with a policewoman next to him. Her father had his head in his hands and was sobbing, and it was left to the policewoman to tell Luna that her mother was dead.

Eventually, Lukas looked up and saw Luna standing there, shaking her head, unbelieving. He pulled her into his arms, then, and the two of them cried together.

For a while after that, with each of them trying their best to help the other, they got along. Lukas held himself together despite his grief; he reduced his work commitments and tried to get as many assignments in and around London as he could so that he could be present for his daughter. He began taking her along to evening engagements, the two of them travelling by train and Tube. The other musicians, friendly acquaintances, would comment on how like him she was, with her serious expression, pale blue eyes and sweet singing voice, when she could be coaxed to sing. Though those who had known Emily swore that Luna's voice was the same as hers.

Despite his reduced income, he managed, just, to continue paying Luna's school fees at the private girls academy Emily had insisted she attend ‘because I want our Stellaluna to get a better start than you or I did.' And he tried, Lukas Gregory tried hard, to care for his daughter.

For her part, Luna secretly revelled in her new and unexpected role as Daddy's girl. She learned to cook – simple things like spaghetti and stew – to surprise him with at the end of a long day. She learned to pour his beer into his favourite glass just as he liked it, and to encourage him to play music for her, just as her mother had done.

And there were happy times. She remembered him taking her to the Royal Opera House to see
La Bohème
, ‘because even if you don't like opera, everyone should experience Puccini at least once.' It was one of the most magical nights of her life, the two of them walking into the opera house as the orchestra tuned up, him in his black suit and the red scarf her mother had given him and her wearing a little silver dress from Topshop with her hair specially straightened for the occasion.

‘You look just like your mother tonight,' he'd said. And squeezed her hand, looking away from her.

It wasn't true, what Stefan thought, that her father had killed himself in front of her. It was rotten luck, and the sheerest happenstance, that her return from a piano exam in London coincided with the moment her father exhausted his ability to persevere within this mortal coil. That afternoon, her train came to an abrupt halt just short of Newbury station and station staff rushed along to usher the passengers off through the front door of the first compartment, the only one that was actually level with the platform.

Luna heard the sound of screams from the opposite platform, and despite her chaperones' best efforts to funnel her towards the station exit, her eyes were drawn to the drama unfolding on and beneath the opposite platform.

A crowd of people had gathered on the platform and police were there, trying to move them along. There were two policemen standing down on the tracks in front of another train. The train driver was still sat at the wheel – it was she who was screaming. And there was a body lying beside the track, broken and lifeless, the red scarf still around its neck.

When Luna returned to school after her father's funeral, they insisted, her headmistress and the powers that be, that she start seeing the school counsellor, to ‘process her grief'. She insisted in turn that this wasn't what she wanted. Luna was a precocious girl – she already understood her grief only too well and she couldn't see the point in talking about it. But none of the adults around her listened when she said it wouldn't do any good, that all she wanted was to be left alone.

So she went along to see the counsellor, a frowsy, pale woman who, it was rumoured, had once had an unhappy affair with a teacher in the boys school. Like the good student Luna was, she took her first session seriously. She told the counsellor everything; about seeing her father's dead body, and not seeing her mother's. About how she had grown up certain of her mother's love but not her father's. About how, after her mother's death, she'd felt glad and guilty at the same time to suddenly have her father to herself, but had known the minute he said how much she reminded him of her mother that she wasn't enough.

And last, how she knew that nothing that had happened was her fault, that bad things happened regardless of what little girls thought or didn't think.

She said all these things, doing her very best to leave nothing out, sometimes with tears running down her cheeks. The counsellor hugged her at the end of the session, praising her for being so open and honest but at the same time looking almost smug, like she'd prised open a particularly difficult box. And Luna sagged with relief that it was over, that she'd never have to go through it again.

But then, when she returned for her next session, the counsellor opened by saying, ‘Tell me more about what it felt like when your father ignored you,' and Luna realised to her horror that their first session had been a confidence trick; that having told this woman everything,
everything,
she would now be expected to go over it again and again, spooling herself and her parents out for a stranger's never ending scrutiny.

For their next meeting, she refused to speak at all. And in the next she discovered a new skill. Tiring of the counsellor's vain attempts to relive the halcyon experience of their initial session, in the thirty-second minute of their hour-long appointment Luna fixed her white-blue eyes on the woman and said simply, ‘So, this is what you do.'

An inoffensive start, one the counsellor batted away with the predictable line about these sessions being about Luna, not her. But Luna didn't stop there. She carried on – carefully, mind; say too much and they thought you were lashing out, and that just made them insist you needed more counselling. No, she said just enough, about the weaknesses she had observed in the counsellor during their three hours together, about the pain of unrequited love and the scorn of a school full of beautiful young girls, about a life lived vicariously through the secrets of these same girls.

The counsellor refused to see her again after that, telling her headmistress that she ‘couldn't help them that refused to be helped.' She quit St Catherine's soon after; Luna heard she moved to Poole.

And so. On to the day when she first saw the Marchioness, her silent benefactor at St Catherine's, standing beside the field on school sports day. She was wearing a black long-sleeved dress and black pashmina, looking grave, self-contained and completely in control of her emotions. In short, everything Luna wanted to be. She'd come to watch Isabelle play rounders, but stayed to watch the subsequent lacrosse game in which Luna was playing. At that time Luna was small for her age, scrawnier than practically every other player on the field. Aware of her audience, she played ferociously, scoring three times. Emotions ran high on the pitch and as she tried to block a much larger girl from the opposing team, the larger girl slammed herself against Luna, knocking her to the ground.

Luna was on her feet immediately, spoiling for a fight, but her left arm refused to move and her coach ran out onto the field, quickly diagnosing a dislocated shoulder. Strange, but Luna scarcely felt the pain at first, eyes locked as they were on the big girl who had brought her down. Her coach instructed her to lift her arm above her head, and then it hurt; Luna had to bite her lip till she tasted blood to stop herself from screaming as her shoulder slipped back into place.

They made the girl come over to apologise and shake hands afterwards, and Luna accepted her apology, leaning forward to hug her and whispering a few words in her ear. The girl walked away moments later, ashen-faced and silent, and Luna looked up to see the Marchioness watching her from across the field.
I know you
, her expression seemed to say.

It was because of that look that Luna said yes when Isabelle invited her to sit next to her and her friends in the lunch room a few days later. And to use her newfound ability, her gift with words, to Isabelle's benefit over the ensuing weeks. For like alpha do-gooders the world over, Isabelle also enjoyed doing bad, from time to time, and had a few enemies at St Catherine's on whom she was only too happy to unleash her new pet. What she failed to anticipate was that Luna was completely incapable of controlling her urges, and just as happy to hurt Isabelle as anyone else. So she hadn't stopped, during her first visit to Arborage, at suggesting that the love of Isabelle's life fuck off back to Sweden. After a subsequent day of silent treatment, during which Isabelle worked herself into a fury that culminated in her confronting Luna in the portrait gallery to inform her of the hell that awaited her on their return to school, Luna had simply rested her cold gaze upon Isabelle and said, ‘But he still won't love you, no matter what you do.'

Isabelle could come up with no reply and settled for storming out of the gallery with the rest of the girls, leaving Luna alone, blood singing through her veins at her latest kill. The rush passed as quickly as it had come, however, just like it always did. She felt herself deflate, her head dropping.

‘Shall I show you a secret?' came a voice from behind her, and Luna turned to see the Marchioness standing there, dressed in black as ever, smiling conspiratorially at her. If she'd heard the exchange between Luna and her daughter she gave no sign of it. Instead she led the way through the gallery, naming the Wellstones in the paintings, telling Luna a little about each of them. Eventually they reached the panelled door that led to the hidden staircase, and Lady Wellstone led her up to the landing, where they looked down on the gallery below.

Looking back, Luna found it difficult to remember exactly what they talked about, there on the stairs. The Marchioness did most of the talking anyway, telling Luna about her plans for renovating the east wing, about the problems they had with woodworm and damp, and the general difficulty of living in a Grade I listed house.

Lady Wellstone touched only briefly on Luna's own situation at the very end of their chat, and she was careful to offer neither censure nor instruction. No, what had taken place on that staircase was a simple act of kindness, one that came at a time when Luna was at a crossroads, faced with a choice as to what kind of person she was going to become.

She returned to school and though she remained a loner she worked hard to curb her unkind impulses. She came up with the coping mechanism of imagining her mother's apothecary chest when her emotions got the best of her. She regrew her hair and, as if she had given her body permission to grow, shot up four whole inches between her thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, finally getting her period just before she turned fifteen. She managed, with help from her headmistress and, she suspected, the unseen hand of the Marchioness, to get a scholarship at the University of Manchester, and a job working as a secretary in the History Department there.

And no, Luna did not believe in fate, but years later, when a headhunter contacted her in Miami to tell her about a role that was opening up at a historic home in Berkshire, it felt that she had come full circle, back to the woman to whom she believed she owed everything, every good thing, that had happened in her life since her parents' deaths.

But some old habits would not die, among them her lasting aversion to conversations that entailed talking about her feelings, and her deep reluctance to discuss her parents. Looking out of her bedroom window in the direction of the Dower House, Luna still couldn't imagine being able to talk to Stefan about them, even knowing how this looked to him.