The bedroom she was allocated wasn’t soft or girly—and why would it be?—but at least it was restful. The bed was big, the view spectacular. The en-suite bathroom had snowy towels and expensive bottles of bath oil and she thought about how perfect everything looked. And then there was her. Standing there in her jeans and T-shirt, she felt like a cobweb which had blown onto a line of clean washing.
‘Do you like it?’ he questioned.
‘I can’t imagine anyone not liking it. It’s beautiful.’ She ran her fingertip along a delicate twist of coloured glass which served no useful purpose other than to capture the light and reflect it back in rainbow rays. ‘I just can’t imagine how a baby is going to fit in here.’
His gaze followed the line of her fingers. ‘Neither can I. But I wasn’t planning on having a baby when I bought this place.’
‘You didn’t think that one day you might have a family of your own? I don’t mean like this, obviously—’
‘Obviously,’ he interrupted tightly. ‘And the answer is no. Not every man feels the need to lock himself into family life—particularly when so few families are happy.’
‘That’s a very cynical point of view, Alek.’
‘You think so? Why, was your own childhood so happy?’ His gaze bore into her. ‘Let me guess. A cosy English village where everyone knew each other? A cottage with roses growing around the door?’
‘Hardly.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I didn’t meet my father until I was eighteen and when I did I wished I hadn’t bothered.’
His eyes had narrowed. ‘Why not?’
It was a story she wasn’t proud of. Correction. It was one she was almost ashamed of. She knew it was illogical, but if you were unloved, then didn’t that automatically make you unlovable? Didn’t the fault lie within her? But she pushed that rogue thought away as she had been trying to do for most of her adult life. And there was no reason to keep secrets from Alek. She wasn’t trying to impress him, because he’d already made it clear that he no longer wanted her. And if you moved past that rather insulting fact—didn’t that mean she could be herself, instead of trying to be the person she thought she ought to be?
‘I’d hate to shock you,’ she said flippantly.
His voice was dry. ‘Believe me, I am not easily shocked.’
She watched as the filmy drapes moved in a cloud-like blur at the edges of the giant windows. ‘My father was a businessman—quite a successful one by all accounts—and my mother worked as his secretary, but she was also his...’ She shrugged as she met his quizzical expression. ‘It sounds so old-fashioned now, but she was his mistress.’
‘Ah,’ he said, in the tone of a man addressing a subject on which he was already an expert. ‘His mistress.’
‘That’s right. It was the usual thing. He set her up in a flat. He bought her clothes and in particular—underwear. They used to go out for what was euphemistically known as “lunch,” which I gather didn’t make her very popular back at the office. Sometimes he even managed to get away for part of a weekend with her, though of course she was always on her own at Christmas and during vacations. She told me all this one night when she’d been drinking.’
‘So what happened?’ he questioned, diplomatically ignoring the sudden tremble in her voice. ‘How come you came along?’
Caught up in a tale she hadn’t thought about in a long time, Ellie sat down heavily on the bed. The Egyptian cotton felt soft as she rested her palms against it and met the cool curiosity in Alek’s eyes. ‘She wanted him to divorce his wife, but he wouldn’t. He kept telling her that he’d have to wait for his children to leave home—again, the usual story. So she thought she’d give him a little encouragement.’
‘And she got pregnant?’
‘She got pregnant,’ she repeated and saw the look on his face. ‘And before you say anything—I did not set out to repeat history. Believe me, the last thing I wanted was to recreate my own childhood. What happened between us was—’
‘An accident,’ he said, almost roughly. ‘Yes, I know that. Go on.’
She’d lost the thread of what she’d been saying and it took her a couple of seconds to pick it up again. ‘I think she mistakenly thought that he’d get used to having a baby. That he might even be pleased...evidence of his virility...that kind of thing. But he wasn’t. He already had three children he was putting through school and a wife with an expensive jewellery habit. He told her...’
Ellie’s voice tailed off. She remembered that awful night of her birthday when her mother had seen off the best part of a bottle of gin and started blubbing—telling her stuff which no child should ever hear. She had buried it deep in the recesses of her own mind, but now it swam to the surface—like dark scum which had been submerged too long.
‘He told her to get rid of it. Or rather...to get rid of me,’ she said, her bright, pointless smile fading as her mother’s words reverberated round her head. And I should have listened to him! If I’d known what lay ahead, I damned well would have listened to him! ‘I think she thought he’d change his mind, but he didn’t. He stopped paying the rent on my mother’s apartment and told his wife about the affair—thus effectively curtailing any thoughts of blackmail. Then they moved to another part of the country and that was the end of that.’
‘He didn’t keep in contact?’
‘Nope. It was different in those days, before social media really took off—it’s easy to lose touch with someone. There was no maintenance—and my mother was too proud to take him to court. She said she’d already lost so much that she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her begging. She said we would manage just fine, but of course—it’s never that simple.’
‘But you said you saw him? When you were eighteen?’
Ellie didn’t answer for a moment, because this territory was not only forbidden—it was unmarked. She wondered whether she should tell him—but how could she not? She hadn’t talked about it with anyone before because she didn’t want to look as if she was drowning in self-pity, but maybe Alek had a right to know.
‘I did see him,’ she said slowly. ‘After my mother died, I tracked him down and wrote to him. Said I’d like to meet him. I was slightly surprised when he agreed.’ And slightly scared, too, because she’d built him up in her head to be some kind of hero. Maybe she’d been longing for the closeness she’d never had with her mother. Perhaps she had been as guilty as the next person of wanting a fairy tale which didn’t exist. The big reunion which was going to make everything in her life better.
‘What happened?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘You really want to know?’
‘I do. You tell a good story,’ he said, surprisingly.
She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t a story, but when she stopped to think about it—maybe it was. Life was a never-ending story—wasn’t that how the old cliché went? She cleared her throat. ‘There was no psychic connection between us. No sense that here was the person whose genes I shared. We didn’t even look alike. He sat on the other side of a noisy table in a café at Waterloo station and told me that my mother was a conniving bitch who had almost ruined his life.’
‘And that was it?’ he asked after