Miranda's Mount (20 page)

He spotted a bench and stopped. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it down to the beach.’

‘Do you want to sit here?’

‘Yes.’

He sat down before he fell down. He felt so tired, suddenly. Maybe it was the rescue, or the hospital or hopping about like a bloody penguin or maybe it was the nights at the Mount. They’d all been long and many of them sleepless, as he’d turned his decision to sell over and over in his mind and, lately, he’d added a new dilemma: his growing feelings for Miranda. They were undeniable now and they weren’t part of his plan at all. If they had only been physical, he might have coped. Looking back, he thought the first spark had started almost when he’d first laid eyes on her, feisty, scared and beautiful, in the armoury. He should never have messed around with her feelings, coming on to her and then behaving like a shit, playing up to the image of the lord of the bloody manor.

He’d got his comeuppance though, got his own heart singed a little.

A lot, actually.

Shit
.

In the
days since they’d almost made love in the rowing boat, he’d tried to keep away from her, but their kiss on the quayside today and the business with Braden had brought them frighteningly closer. They’d shared an empathy that had made him contemplate the unthinkable: staying at the Mount and making a home there.

A home with
her
in it.

He’d glimpsed a future where he would, after all, be a father to his children, perhaps a little boy like Braden, who he would love and care for. They would poke around in rock pools together and eat too many ice creams. Then the sight of the hospital, the nurses and doctors, the sights and smells of sickness and futility had uncovered raw, jagged memories he didn’t want to face.

He laid his crutches on the ground as Miranda perched on the far end of the bench. ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Keep away from me.’

‘What do you mean?’

She seemed nervous of even getting close to him. She had good reason. ‘Your first instincts about me in the armoury were right. I’m a dangerous bastard.’ He shoved his hands through his hair. ‘Christ, I sound defensive. I don’t mean to. Coming back here has done that to me and I don’t want this … what’s happened already to go any further. I want to tell you the truth about me now, not at the end.’

‘The end?’

‘Yes,
the end. After we’ve kissed, made love, after I’ve held you and said stuff I shouldn’t when we’re in bed and made you think there’s hope and that we’re all going to live happily ever after at the Mount.’

She gasped. ‘Now wait a minute, Jago. I never said wanted any of that. I’ve never even given you a hint of it. How can you assume …’

‘I know you want me to stay.’

‘Yes, to run the Mount! But one kiss and an almost-shag doesn’t mean I want to play happy families with you and be Queen of the Castle!’

Was she playing devil’s advocate? Telling him she didn’t want to get involved with him? She was right to be furious at his assumptions but he was right to have them. She wanted him, he knew that from the way she’d pressed herself against him when they’d kissed. He knew from the way she’d closed her eyes and invited him deeper inside her. She’d trailed her fingers over his back, exploring, almost begging him to pull her against him, wanting
more
from him.

‘Well, you knew I was an arrogant bastard. Maybe I’m assuming too much but you can’t deny that if we let things go any further things would get bloody difficult. You don’t know what I’m capable of – or rather what I’m
not
capable of and I don’t want to let things get that far and then you wake up one morning to find I’ve turned into Mr Hyde. Waiting until the end of the story would be a huge cop out and you deserve better than that.’

She folded her
arms. ‘Oh really? So, are you going to keep me in agony any longer before you tell me your Big Secret?’

‘No, I’m not going to make you wait any longer,’ he said, so calmly, he surprised himself. ‘Cutting a long story short, my wife died.’

It was so unexpected that Miranda physically flinched and gasped out loud. She stared at him.

‘It’s OK. I mean, it’s not OK, obviously, because it ripped me apart but it’s been … was a while ago. I ought to be able to say it now without making people want to get the hell away from me.’ He felt as if he was floating, as if another man was speaking now. Maybe it was the shots the nurse had given him, or maybe he was simply distancing himself from the story: telling her about another man or else he would pass out with the grief and pain of it. ‘I’ll say it again. My wife died. Rhianna died. And, please, don’t say you’re sorry.’

He thought he’d cut off any response but she tried anyway. ‘I will say it because I feel it. I
am
sorry. How could I not be? But I don’t understand … please, forgive me but what has that got to do with you not wanting to come back home?’

‘Because I was
supposed to come back with her, with Rhianna, with our family.’ He smiled because she was kind and beautiful and thought she would change his mind by talking. ‘You see, once upon a time, I couldn’t wait to get back to the Mount but it’s a long story and you’ll walk away when you hear it.’

Was that what Jago hoped
for? That she would just get up and leave him? Leaving him now was the last thing she intended. If a tidal wave had rolled in from the ocean, she’d have stayed with Jago on that bench.

‘I’m not going anywhere, so you’d better get on with it,’ she said lightly, as unease crawled up her spine like some hideous insect.

He shook his head. ‘Miss Whiplash, eh? I should have known you’d show your true colours.’

‘Jago … don’t try and joke and get away from this now. Tell me.’

He took a deep breath. ‘It started when my father died just after I’d finished my A levels. I came home from boarding school and helped my mother manage the Mount as best as I could. I’m sorry to say this but, with my father gone, I suddenly saw the place in a new light. It was like a burden had been lifted from us both. This will probably sound hard but Dad had been a total shit, frankly – to me and to her.’

‘Did he …?’ she couldn’t say the word.

‘Abuse
me? No. He beat me a few times until I got bigger than him, but largely he just ignored me. I was away at school most of the time but my mother bore the full brunt of him. He didn’t lay a hand on her, as far as I know, or I would have killed him myself, but he had his own way of torturing her. He had a string of other women and he didn’t care that she knew about them. I heard him once, the bastard, taunting her with a new woman he’d met in London, telling my mother she was old and past it and that he could get a divorce any time he wanted.’ He clenched his fist.

Miranda wanted to comfort him but didn’t dare. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’

‘No one really does though the older staff have an inkling. But what really went on behind closed doors is private. That’s how we deal with things, the St Merryns. You see I am my father’s son in that way.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘So you wanted to stay at the Mount when you got back from university?’

‘Yes but Mother was having none of it. Back then she was still fit and more than able to run the place without my help. She told me to go off and “see the world”. She obviously thought it would be a good idea if I sowed my wild oats for a while and then came back in a few years’ time. I was only twenty-one so it was a good plan in theory but I think she fully expected me to return and take up the reins.’

‘And did you? Sow your wild oats, I mean?’

‘I suppose so. I bummed round the world for a while, doing the usual. Grape picking, bar work, surfing, having a lot of filthy sex.’ His gaze slid to her, perhaps hoping he’d shocked her and she’d have to glance away.

Heat flooded through her up to her cheeks but her reply was cool. ‘Go on.’

‘I enjoyed
it, I’ll admit. No one knew who I was and, frankly, no one gave a toss anyway. Who gives a shit that you’re an earl when you’re riding a half pipe in Oahu?’

‘How did you end up in Oz?’

‘I hooked up with a couple of guys and we ended up in Bells Beach where I worked as an instructor for a couple of years.’ He swallowed and stared at the breakers thundering up the sands. ‘I always intended to go back to the Mount sooner or later, I just stayed a little longer than I’d expected.’

‘Is that where you met Rhianna?’

He nodded. ‘She was a physio, someone recommended her to me when I damaged a disc in my back. I visited her and, well, it’s hard not to fall for a girl when you’re laid face down at her mercy with your pants off.’ And that, Miranda knew, was code for Jago having fallen crazily in love with Rhianna. ‘Six months later we got married.’

Only six months? He really was crazy about her, then. ‘Did she know who you were?’

‘I told her after she’d accepted me, but she didn’t give a toss, in the way of most Aussies. She only cared that I was a half-decent surfer and that … well, we were loved up, I suppose.’

He supposed? Miranda could see how much Jago cared for Rhianna. The love and pain were etched onto his features.

‘We’d been married a couple of months when there was an accident.’ He paused briefly. ‘We were in the water when she wiped out and hit her head on a reef. I managed to pull her out and the lifeguards brought her round but when we got her to hospital, we found out she was paralysed from the neck down.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Shit happens as they say. But until then I’d thought it happened to other people. Not to me or Rhianna. She was young and fit. I thought we were both invincible.’

Miranda
longed to comfort him, to hold him but he was not the kind of man you hugged or comforted and she didn’t know if she was the kind of woman who could hug or comfort anyone. She floundered, confronted by conflicting feelings. Sympathy for him, and yet a horrible sense of dread at what it all meant for her. ‘I’m so sorry. It must have been terrible for both of you,’ she said, lamely.

‘I kept on believing she’d get better and walk again and I kept on telling Rhianna that too. I spent a fortune trying to find some cure for her and, when that failed, I fitted out a house and I nursed her.’

A laughing group of girls carrying boards trotted past them down to the surf.

‘So you bring me here to tell me this? To a surfing beach?’

‘I know it seems crazy but I’m like a burned child drawn to the fire. You have to understand that I don’t mind being reminded of Rhianna or of what happened. It focuses my mind.’

Her body tensed, suspecting his focus was not a good thing. His hand was next to hers on the bench. She wanted to close her hand over it and comfort him but she didn’t dare. ‘Can I ask how she died?’

‘Not soon enough, unfortunately and I’m sorry if that makes me sound like a heartless bastard. She was young and fit, and all she had to look forward to was a lifetime hooked up to a machine, pumped full of drugs, with me wiping her backside. She asked me to stop lying to her that she would get better, and I shouted at her. I couldn’t face what she’d accepted; that she
wanted
to die.’

He wasn’t being heartless, in fact Miranda thought the opposite, as he ploughed on bitterly, as if unable to stop himself, or else afraid that if he did he would clam up entirely.

‘Rhianna lived for the waves and the outdoors. She was an athlete and she couldn’t face life as the person – the physical husk – that she’d become. The doctors hoped she’d come to terms with her condition in time but, after eighteen months in that bed, she begged me to finish her off.’

Miranda held her breath as his voice quietened. ‘Every day she asked me to get her some pills or put a pillow over her face, but I couldn’t do it. I
wouldn’t
do it. Maybe I hadn’t grown up enough to do that. Maybe I didn’t …’

She knew he was going to say ‘love her enough’. She bit back tears as he turned to face her. ‘Could you have done it?’

He wanted
Miranda to absolve him, like a young boy asking for approval. Had he done the right thing? It was gut-wrenchingly painful and impossible to answer. Not when she’d asked herself that often enough recently. She’d been so sure, for so long, that abandoning her mother was the right thing but, lately, she’d questioned herself.

‘I don’t know what I’d have done but I’m gutted that she suffered and that you still hurt so much now.’

He removed his hand as if she’d hurt him. ‘Me? I didn’t give a toss about me! Rhianna hurt, more than any human being should ever hurt. I was just there, watching, waiting, useless.’

‘Not
useless. What happened … at the end?’

‘A miracle happened. She caught got pneumonia and she went quickly. Even the doctors were surprised how fast she went downhill, once she knew she had an infection. It was as if she’d grabbed on to the chance to go with every ounce of strength she had left.’

Miranda could hardly bear to look at his face. ‘How long ago did it all happen?’

‘Since she died? Two years. Three months.’

‘And how
many weeks?’ she asked softly, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell her. If he’d forgotten that kind of detail, then maybe there was hope.

‘Two years, three months and six days.’

‘You must love her very much.’

His silence answered her question. No ‘loved’. No denial. No ‘I
did
’. Jago was still in love with his dead wife, grieving for the family he couldn’t have. There was no argument with his reasons for selling and leaving; she had to accept it. She could almost hear the bell tolling, the bell that some said they could hear from beneath the waves off the coast, booming out from the seabed for the lost souls of sailors.

‘We wanted kids, you know … Lots of them. After we’d surfed some more and travelled some more, we were going to have some children and then I was going to come back here to the Mount and we were all going to live happily ever after. I told her all about it and she said she’d come with me.’

‘And now you hate the place?’

‘Not hate but I can’t live there now. I need to be anywhere but there.’ He glanced behind him, miles away to where the Mount stood on the other coast, out of sight but still huge, solid and eternal. ‘Does that make any kind of sense?’