He surveyed her from between half-shuttered eyes. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’
Leila was so surprised at his sudden change of heart that it took a moment before she could speak, and all the time her head was telling her to go easy. Not to scare him off with a fierce interrogation.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘All the usual things. Like, where you were born. I don’t even know that.’
For a moment, there was silence. It reminded her of the moment before the start of a play, when the whole theatre was quiet and prepared for revelation. And then he began to speak.
‘I was born in the south of France. But we moved back to England when I was a baby—to a place called Brighton.’
‘Yes, Brighton. I’ve heard of it.’ Leila nodded and began reciting, as if she were reading from a geographical textbook. ‘It’s a seaside town on the south coast. Is it very beautiful—this Brighton?’
In spite of everything, Gabe gave a glimmer of a smile. At times she seemed so foreign and so naive but of course, in many ways, she was. Maybe she thought he came from a background like hers and telling her that he had been born on the French Riviera would only feed into that fantasy.
The truth, he reminded himself. She needed to know the truth.
‘Anywhere by the sea has the potential to be beautiful,’ he said. ‘But, like any town, there are rough parts—and those were the places we lived. Not that we stayed anywhere very long.’
‘We?’
‘My mother and me.’
‘Your father wasn’t around?’
Gabe could taste the sudden bitterness in his mouth. He wanted to stop this unwanted interrogation right now, but he realised that these questions were never going to go away unless he answered them.
And wasn’t it time he told someone?
‘No, my father wasn’t around,’ he said. ‘He and my mother split up before I was born. Things ended badly and she brought me back to England, but she had no family of her own and no money. When she met my father, she’d been working as a waitress—and that was all she was qualified to do.’
‘So, was your father French?’ questioned Leila, thinking that he didn’t look French.
He shook his head. ‘No. He was Russian.’
Slowly, she nodded, because that made sense. Much more sense. The high, chiselled cheekbones, which made his face look so autocratic and proud. The icy grey eyes. The hair, which looked like dark, molten gold. ‘So what kind of childhood did you have?’ she asked quietly.
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. ‘It was largely characterised by subterfuge. My mother was always afraid that my father would try to find me and so we were always on the move. Always living just below the radar. Our life was spent running. And hiding.’
If he thought about it, he could still remember the constant sensation of fear. Of looking over his shoulder. Of being told never to give anything away to any stranger he might meet. He had quickly learnt how to appear impenetrable to those he met.
And hadn’t the surveillance and masquerade skills he’d acquired stood him in good stead for his future career? He had discovered that the world of advertising was the world of illusion. That what you saw was never quite what you got. The masks he had perfected to keep his identity hidden had been invaluable in his role as a powerful executive. They were what had provided him with his chameleon-like reputation. As careers went, his background had been a perfect fit.
‘My mother took what jobs she could,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult to juggle poorly paid work around childcare and I pretty much brought myself up. I soon learnt to look after myself. To rewire dodgy electrics and to shop for cheap food when the supermarkets were about to close.’
Leila blinked in surprise, because the image he painted was about as far away from the sophisticated billionaire she’d married as it was possible to imagine. But she still thought there was something he wasn’t telling her. Some dark secret which was lurking just out of sight. I need to know this for my baby, she thought fiercely. For our baby.
‘And?’
His mouth hardened. She saw the flash of something bleak in the depths of his eyes before it was gone again.
‘I used to feel indignant that my father had never bothered to look us up. I wondered why he didn’t seem to care how his son was doing—or why he’d never once offered to help out financially. It became something of an obsession with me. I used to ask my mother what he was like, but she never wanted to talk about him. And the more she refused to tell me, the more frustrating I found it.’
His words tailed off, and for a moment he said nothing. Leila held her breath but didn’t speak, not wanting to break his concentration.
‘As I grew older, I became more determined to find out something about him,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t necessarily want to be with him—I just wanted to know.’
‘Of course you did,’ she said.
Their eyes met, and Gabe suddenly got a painful flash of insight. Maybe he’d wanted to know for exactly the same reasons that Leila wanted to know about him. Maybe everybody had a fundamental desire to learn about their roots. Or the roots of the child they carried...
‘But my mother was scared,’ he said. ‘I can see that now. She was scared that I would run to a man she feared. That I would choose him over her.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course, I only discovered this afterwards.’
‘Afterwards?’ she echoed as some grim ending glinted as darkly as thick blotting paper held over the beam of a flashlight.
He nodded, and the way he swallowed made Leila think of barbed wire; of something jagged and sharp lodging in his throat and making his words sound painful and distorted.
‘It was the eve of my sixteenth birthday,’ he said. ‘We were living in this tiny hole of place. It was small and dark and I started wondering what kind of life my father had. Whether he was wealthy. Or whether he was reduced to eating food which was past its sell-by date and shivering like us, because it was the coldest spring in nearly thirty years. So I asked my mother the same question I’d been asking ever since I could remember. Did she have any idea where he was or what he did? And as always, she told me no.’
‘And you believed her?’ questioned Leila tentatively.
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what to believe, but I was on the brink of adulthood and I couldn’t tolerate being fobbed off with evasive answers any more. I told her that the best birthday present she could give me would be to tell me the truth. That either she provided me with some simple facts about my parentage—or I would go and seek my father out myself. And that she should be under no illusion that I would find him. I was probably harsher than I should have been, but I had the arrogance of youth and the certainty that what I was doing was right.’
There was complete silence, and Leila’s heart pounded painfully as she looked at him, for she had never seen an expression on a man’s face like that before. Not even when her brother had returned from that terrible battle with insurgents in Port D’Leo and his two most senior commanders had been slain in front of him. There was a helplessness and a hopelessness glinting in Gabe’s eyes which was almost unbearable to observe.
‘She said she would tell me the next day, on my birthday. But...’
His words tailed off and Leila knew he didn’t want to tell her any more, but she needed to know. And he needed to say it. ‘But what?’
‘I think she meant to tell me,’ he said. ‘But I also think she was terrified of the repercussions. Afraid that she might lose me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘But when I got back from school the next day, she couldn’t tell me anything