The Maestro's Mistress (28 page)

Georgiana judged that she had
made a full and exhaustive consideration of a child’s needs. In doing this she
had let her thoughts run back to her own childhood and followed the blueprint
of her parents’ care. Her mind fastened entirely on their example. In their
life at the cottage
she
would be them and Alessandra would be
her.

How could they fail to be happy?

Alessandra slept until they got
to the cottage. As the car drew to a halt she woke up, registered her situation
and started to howl once more. Georgiana’s heart beat like a drum. Blood
pounded through the veins in her temples. There followed seemingly endless,
nightmarish hours of screaming.

The child’s face was red and
contorted with rage. Georgiana’s eyes raced over her features and saw first
Saul and then Tara. She blinked in confusion. But then she touched the child’s
buttery blonde hair and felt reassured.

By midnight she was frantic for
the opportunity to sleep. Alessandra seemed to have an iron grip on
consciousness. She was exhausted from fear and sobbing but each time she
drifted into a preliminary doze she wakened with a start and recommenced her
howling.

Georgiana’s eyes hurt. Her skin
prickled. The nerves in her arms and legs twitched. The baby supper on the
table was rejected, the little jars of liquidised beef, mushy carrots and apple
slush giving off a uniformly malty smell which turned Georgiana’s stomach.
There was the stench of warm wet nappy too, a result of her half hour struggle
to change the squirming, thrashing Alessandra and make her clean and sweet
again.

When she had tried to feed the
child, the food had ended up spattered all over her dress. Her stockings felt
sticky and her pale suede shoes were streaked with glinting threads of drying
food.

It was late now and the child’s
continuing cries were like scalding needles piercing her. Even the brief silences
were torment. One never knew when the peace would be shattered.

Georgiana decided to put the
child in her cot and leave her. Even if she yelled the place down. Even if all
the village came battering at the door in protest. She must sleep. It was
unthinkable not to be able to sleep. How did parents manage when children
behaved like this?  Could it go on for days? Weeks? She decided to undress in
the downstairs bathroom, running both the taps at full so as to activate the
noisy plumbing and drown out the human cries coming from upstairs.

She recalled reading reports of
parents who had battered their young children, killed them even. Suddenly it
was possible to comprehend.

A rosy glow was creeping over the
rugged Cornish coast as Xavier and Doctor Denton came within striking distance
of the cottage. The steep road leading down to the shore was glistening with
early morning moisture.

‘How long since you were here
last?’ Dr Denton enquired, maintaining a conversational tone. His palms were
damp with anxious anticipation as if he were on the runway in an accelerating
jet.

‘Ten years at least. I don’t care
for the English idea of country life.’

‘And Georgiana?’

‘She hated it – the reality of
it. Of course there were all the golden memories of childhood wrapped up in the
place. Neither she nor her parents ever let go of those. The cottage should
have been sold long ago, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.’

He parked the car at the side of
the house. A beech hedge screened the lower part of the house. There was a sizeable
English country garden to the front with roses and gladioli flowering in
colourful abundance. Sitting on the narrow driveway was a sleek sapphire-blue
Mercedes.

‘Ah yes, she’s here,’ Xavier said
darkly. He paused, looking up at the first floor windows. The curtains were
still drawn. ‘So? What now?’

Dr Denton felt the chill of those
penetrating grey eyes. ‘We shouldn’t do anything to alarm her. We should simply
act as friendly callers.’

Xavier made a guttural sound of
derision. ‘Impossible. I think I might kill her.’

‘I’ll go in,’ Dr Denton said,
closing the car door soundlessly behind him. Dread clutched at his guts. His
experience had taught him that human behaviour was made up of a high degree of
predictability coupled with a hefty dash of spontaneous impulse. And when the
personality became disturbed the tendency to obey the edicts of blind impulse
was more pronounced. He had spoken the truth to Xavier when he had said that
Georgiana’s wish was to possess not destroy. But general trends in motivation
were no more than a small part in any life story.

His ears strained for the sound
of a child’s cries as he stood outside the front door. His stomach curdled with
fear. He tapped gently on the door. He waited. Tapped again. Eventually he
lifted the heavy brass knocker. The noise it made seemed to shatter the early
morning calm, reverberating in his ears like gunfire.

The door opened and Georgiana
stood before him, immaculate and lovely in an aquamarine satin negligee. Her
face through the perfect make-up showed little sign of strain, although there
were faint creases between her brows and tiny lines fanning out from the
corners of her lashes which he had not noticed before.

She looked at him uncertainly.
Behind her the house appeared darkened and dead looking. There was a terrible
doom-laden silence hanging in the air.

‘Georgiana,’ he said, taking her
hands in his. ‘I’ve come to see your holiday home.’

Slowly she stepped to one side.

‘You’re looking very lovely,’ he
told her, moving smoothly into the narrow hallway. ‘At your most beautiful.’ He
laid a protective hand on her shoulder, allowed the pressure to increase before
he removed it.

She took him into a recently
restored kitchen full of stripped pine and oatmeal-coloured tiles. There was a
hideous, slum-like mess on the table. A soiled nappy was screwed up on one of
the chairs emitting a sour, earthy stench.

At the sink Georgiana fiddled
with the kettle.

As Dr Denton surveyed the outer
scene and contemplated the internal squalor in Georgiana’s head he was surprised
to find himself both shocked and sickened. He had thought he was beyond all
that. But this was not the consulting room. This was life.

‘Your holiday home,’ he commented
soothingly, staring around him with appreciation.

She nodded. The silence was
becoming unbearable.

Georgiana paused as she turned
off the taps, tilting her head sharply like a watchful lone animal on strange
territory.

‘You feel happy here,’ Dr Denton
suggested gently.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said
pitifully. ‘I got no sleep.  There were no beautiful dreams.’

Dr Denton took a few moments to
consider the appropriate response.

Georgiana stiffened. Her eyes
slanted towards the door and the stairway. Following her gaze Denton found
himself immobilized, stripped of all power of action.

With a swift and vicious movement
Georgiana slammed the kitchen door. She looked around her, her eyes blinking
and puzzled. Eventually she crossed to the cutlery drawer and took out a bread
knife, then took bread from a hand-painted stone bin. Grasping the blade of the
knife she stared at it, turning it so the blade flashed with a pale white light
from a frail struggling sun beyond the window.

Her fingers moved experimentally
over the glinting serrations. A thread of blood darted across the pad of her
thumb. She looked across to Denton. She looked back at the knife.

He breathed deeply, held himself
still.

Georgiana turned and looked out
of the window. Following her glance Dr Denton saw Xavier coming up the path
towards the door. He flinched inwardly, fearing an explosive response from
Georgiana when her husband challenged her.

‘Saul is here!’ Georgiana
exclaimed. She went swiftly out into the hallway. ‘Saul!’ she said, her voice
bright with anticipation.

Saul held out his arms to her and
she moved into them with a long sigh. ‘You’ve no need to worry any more now,’
he told her. ‘I’ll take care of everything.’

‘Thank God.
Oh, thank you God
!’
She wound her arms up around his neck. With one hand Saul gently disengaged the
knife and allowed it to slide to the floor.

Suddenly there was a shrill
scream of terrified infant rage from the upper floor of the cottage.

Saul flung his head back, a great
sigh easing itself from deep in his chest.

The noise of the baby’s crying
intensified and accelerated, hammering through the fabric of the cottage.

‘I didn’t get any sleep at all,’
Georgiana complained piteously.

‘Ah, my poor Georgiana,’ Saul
said. ‘What torment. You always needed your rest so badly. Well you must have
it now. I shall take you to bed and then I shall take care of the baby whilst
you have a lovely long sleep.’

Georgiana gave a sigh of blissful
relief. Saul was back and suddenly life was simple again. Saul would know what
to do to stop the baby crying. He would take care of everything.

He led her upstairs and propelled
her to the frilled four-poster bed dominating the main bedroom. He wound the
bedclothes tenderly around her and kissed her cheek. Then closing the door
behind him he raced into the next room.

Alessandra stood in her cot, a
pathetic deserted figure bellowing in despair and misery. Her soiled, soaked
nappy was entwined around her feet and the stench of urine coming from the
bedding was rancid and powerful. Her face was laced with tracks of countless
unstoppable tears and her lips were purple with distress.

Anger to see his beloved child
subjected to such a painful and humiliating ordeal swirled viciously through
Saul’s head. Alessandra stared at him in distrustful bewilderment for a few
seconds and then she threw out her round baby arms to him. ‘Dadda!’

He held her very close, feeling
her heart ticking frantically against his collar bone. His eyes closed as a
surge of feeling engulfed him.

Later on Dr Denton moved around
the kitchen attempting to put together some kind of breakfast. Xavier sat down
at the table with the damp Alessandra on his knee.

She appeared ravenous, snatching
up fingers of toast and cramming them into her mouth. Xavier cradled her head
in his hands from time to time and kissed her brow. ‘Thank God she is safe and
well!’

Dr Denton looked at the child’s
face, smooth and serene once more as the negative feelings had simply drained
away and evaporated into the air. Suddenly he felt very tired.

‘I need to get back to London,’
Xavier said abruptly. ‘Will you deal with things here?’

Dr Denton nodded. ‘I think she is
going to need a period of in-patient treatment,’ he ventured.

‘I want the best clinic there is.
She couldn’t bear anywhere coarse and brutal.’

‘There is no shortage of good
places.’

‘Will you see to it?’

‘Of course.’ Dr Denton gave the
answer automatically and then thought about it. ‘I’d be glad to.’

Xavier stood up, clasping the
child closely against him. ‘Poor Georgiana – I had no idea how ill she had
become.’

That is one way of looking at it
Dr Denton thought. Psychopathically narcissistic and potentially dangerous is
another.

As Xavier began to prepare the
child for their journey Dr Denton was impressed with the almost maternal ease
with which he handled her. He had thought that the charismatic, worldly, Xavier
would be a man encapsulated in a protected world, a man with little tolerance
of the ceaseless, irrational demands of a child. He saw instead the strong bond
between father and daughter, the trust in the child’s eyes, the tender
protectiveness in the parent’s. All the complex mesh of shared genetics.

Xavier, a man alone in the world.
No parents, no family. A man of his own creation. But he had his child. Warm
flesh, pulsing blood.

Thank God for that, Dr Denton
kept inwardly repeating.

Xavier eventually left,
Alessandra safely harnessed into the seat he had wrenched from Georgiana’s
Mercedes. Dr Denton listened to the high whining note of the car’s engine as it
faded into the distance. As Xavier’s presence withdrew from the house, so Dr
Denton felt his own personal freedom and professional competence slowly seeping
back.

He waited for an hour or so, then
made fresh tea and mounted the stairs to Georgiana’s room. She lay on her side,
tranquil and lovely, one golden-skinned arm resting outside the covers.

Dr Denton sat on the bed and
stared down at her for a long moment, stroking her cheek with lingering
fingers. Then, very gently, he pulled the covers back and slipped his hand on
the curve of her waist.

CHAPTER
26

Tara struggled back into
consciousness. The first thing she registered was the reassuring figure of her
mother sitting close by the bed.

Rachel smiled. ‘Hello.’