‘What difference does it make that a woman walked out of a house on a Greek island over thirty years ago?’
‘It makes all kinds of difference. I want to know about her. I want to know whether she was artistic, or good at math. I’m trying to join up all the dots, Alek—to imagine what kind of characteristics our baby might inherit. Maybe it’s extra important to me because I don’t know much about my own father. If things were different, I’d have learnt the answers to some of these questions already.’
Alek stared at her as her passionate words broke into the quiet Italian morning. Her own upbringing hadn’t been much of a picnic but, despite all that, her mother had stuck by her, hadn’t she? Ellie hadn’t been rejected by the one person you were supposed to be able to rely on. Behind her the jasmine and miniature lemon trees made her look like a character in a painting. In her silky robe she looked fresh and young, and nothing could disguise the flicker of hope in her eyes. Did she think there was going to be some fairy-tale ending, that he could soothe everything over and make everything okay with a few carefully chosen words?
His jaw tightened. Maybe he should tell her the truth. Let her understand the kind of man he really was—and why. Let her know that his emotional coldness wasn’t something he’d just invented to pass the time. It had been ground into him from the start—embedded too deeply for him to be any other way. Maybe knowing that would nip any rosy dreams she was in danger of nurturing. Show her why the barriers he’d erected around himself were impenetrable. And why he wouldn’t want them any other way.
‘There were no custody visits or vacations,’ he said. ‘For a long time, I knew nothing about my mother. Or indeed, any mother. When you grow up without something, you don’t even realise you’re missing it. Her name was never mentioned in front of me, and the only women I knew were my father’s whores.’
She flinched at his use of the word and he saw her compose her face into an expression of understanding. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable not to like the women who supplanted your mother—’
‘Oh, please. Quit the amateur psychology,’ he interrupted, pushing his fingers impatiently through his hair. ‘I’m not making a prudish judgement because it makes me feel better. They were whores. They looked like whores and acted like whores. He paid them for sex. They were the only women I came in contact with. I grew up thinking that all females caked their face in make-up and wore skirts short enough for you to see their knickers.’ And one in particular who had invited a boy of twelve to take her knickers down so that she could show him a good time.
Did she believe him now? Was that why she was biting her lip? He could almost see her mind working overtime as she searched for something to say—as if trying to find a positive spin to put on what he’d just told her. He could have saved her the trouble and told her there was none.
‘But...you must have had friends,’ she said, a touch of desperation in her voice now. ‘You must have looked at their mothers, and wondered what had happened to yours.’
‘I had no friends,’ he said flatly. ‘My life was carefully controlled. I might as well have had a prison as a house. I saw no one except for the servants—my father liked childless, unmarried servants who could devote all their time to him. And if you have nothing with which to compare, then no comparisons can be made. His island was remote and inaccessible. He ran everything and owned everything. I lived in a vast complex which was more like a palace and I was tutored at home. I didn’t find out anything about my mother until I was seven years old and when I did—the boy who told me was beaten.’
He stared into space. Should he tell her that the boy’s injuries had been so bad that he’d been airlifted to the hospital on the mainland and had never returned? And that the boy’s parents—even though they had been extremely poor—had threatened to go to the police? Alek had only been young but he remembered the panic which had swirled around the complex as a result. He remembered the fearful faces of his father’s aides, as if the old man really had overstepped the mark this time. But he’d wriggled out of it, just as he always did. Money had been offered, and accepted. Money got you whatever it was you wanted. It bought silence as well as sex—and another catastrophe had been averted. And hadn’t he done that, too? Hadn’t he paid off Ellie’s contract with the Irishwoman with the same ruthlessness which his father would have employed?
He saw the distress on her face and tried to imagine how this must sound through her ears. Incredible, probably. Like one of those porn films his father’s bodyguards used to watch, late into the night. He wondered if he stopped the story now, whether it would be enough to make her understand why he was not like other men. But she had demanded the truth and perhaps she would continue to demand it. To niggle away at it, as women invariably did. He realised that for the first time in his life he couldn’t just block her out, or refuse to take her calls. To fade her into the background as if she had never existed, which was what he’d always done before. Whether he liked it or not, he was stuck with Ellie Brooks, or Ellie Sarantos as she was now. And maybe she ought to learn that it was better not to ask questions in case you didn’t like the answers.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ he demanded. ‘Any other stone you’ve left unturned?’
‘What did the boy tell you about your mother?’
‘He told me the truth. That she’d left in the middle of the night with one of the island’s fishermen.’ He leant back against the intricate wrought-iron tracings of the balustrade. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a woman call out in Italian and a child answered. ‘It was convenient that she chose a lover with his own boat, for there would have been no other way of her leaving the island without my father knowing about it. But I guess her main achievement was in managing to conduct an affair right under his nose, without the old man finding out. And the fact that she was prepared to risk his rage.’ His mouth twisted. ‘She must have been quite some woman.’
He felt a pain he hadn’t felt in a long time. A hot, unwelcome pain which excluded everything else. It stabbed at his heart like a rusty knife and he wished he’d told her to mind her own business, but now he was on a roll and somehow he couldn’t stop—pain or no pain. ‘My father was completely humiliated by her desertion and determined to wipe away all traces of her. Something he found surprisingly easy to accomplish.’ He looked into her bright eyes and then he said it. He’d never admitted it before. Never told anyone. Not the therapist he’d half-heartedly consulted when he’d been living in New York, not any of his friends, nor the women who’d shared his bed in the intervening years and tried to dig away to get at the truth. No one. Not until now. He swallowed as the bitterness rose up inside him like a dark tide. ‘I never even saw a photo of her. He destroyed them all. My mother is a stranger to me. I don’t even know what she looks like.’
She didn’t gasp or utter some meaningless platitude. She just sat there and nodded—as if she was absorbing everything he’d told her. ‘But...didn’t you ever think about tracking her down and hearing her side of the story?’
He stared at her. ‘Why would I want to find a woman who left me behind?’
‘Oh, Alek. Because she’s your mum, that’s why.’ She got up and walked across the sun-dappled balcony until she’d reached him. And then she put her arms tightly around his back and held him, as if she never wanted to let him go.
He felt her fingers wrapping themselves around him—like one of those speeded-up documentaries of a fast-growing vine which covered everything in seconds. He tried to move away. He didn’t need her softness or her sympathy. He didn’t need a thing from her. He had learnt to live with pain and abandonment and to normalise them. He had pushed his memories into a place of restricted access and had slammed the door on them...what right did she have to make him open the door and stare at all those dark spectres? Did she get some kind of kick out of making him confront stuff that was dead and buried?
He wanted to push her away, but her soft body was melting against his. Her fingers were burying themselves in his hair and suddenly he was kissing her like a man who had