‘It’s the jet lag, isn’t it? It takes some getting used to. You’re tired, but you feel you shouldn’t be, isn’t that right? It’s a kind of mental hurdle, and it affects different people different ways. Personally, I find the atmosphere here makes me feel rather sleepy, and I never have any trouble adjusting to the time change.’
Tobie bent her head. ‘How lucky for you,’ she commented, and fortunately Mark didn’t hear the irony in her tone. Nevertheless, the fact that it was there at all troubled her, and she felt the start of a headache hammering at her temples. It was the thought of tomorrow, she realised uneasily, the thought of going to Emerald Cay and meeting Robert again, with the awareness of his condition like a Damoclean sword hanging over her head.
‘We could make love,’ Mark murmured now, sliding his arms about her waist and drawing her closer to him, but as usual, Tobie panicked at the possessive touch of his hands. There were times, like this, when she wondered if she would be able to respond to any man again, and her words were sharper than they might have been because of her uncertainty.
‘Oh, not now, Mark!’ she exclaimed, releasing herself without consideration for his feelings, her sense of guilt redoubling at the awareness of the pain she was inflicting. ‘I—want to take a shower, and get changed for dinner. Do you mind?’
Mark hesitated. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked perceptively, alerted by her nervousness, and with a sigh she spread her hands.
‘I’ve got a headache, if you must know,’ she admitted unwillingly. ‘I—I’ve had it since we got off the plane. I’m sorry if I’m bad company, but it really is painful.’
‘Hey, why didn’t you say?’ Mark disappeared back into his own room to reappear a few moments later with a bottle of tablets. ‘Here, swallow a couple of these. They’ll take care of the headache, and the jet lag. Take a cool shower, and I’ll meet you in the bar downstairs in half an hour. I promise you, you’ll feel a different woman.’
Tobie wished she could feel as sure, but she thanked him for his kindness, bestowing a warm kiss of appeasement on his mouth before he departed once more. ‘I don’t deserve you, do you know that?’ she murmured, touching his cheek with wondering fingers, and he captured them and carried them to his mouth before wishing her a gruff farewell.
The twin-engined Cessna made its approach to the tiny airstrip on Emerald Cay at eleven o’clock the following morning. As it circled the small island, Mark pointed out the places of interest to Tobie, leaning past her to indicate the whereabouts of his brother’s villa, and to share her admiration of the shimmering green waters of the lagoon.
‘The reef provides a natural barrier to intruders,’ he remarked, drawing her attention to its exposed teeth. ‘There’s one point of access, below the villa. Rob had an entry blasted in the coral so that his yacht can get in and out, but otherwise …’ He shrugged.
Tobie digested this. So Robert had a yacht. It was probably one of those motor yachts, the luxurious kind she had seen in the harbour at Castries that morning, not one of the tall-masted sailing vessels, whose sails looked so picturesque against the azure blue waters of the ocean. Robert had always loved speed, and Mark had told her that some of them could do thirty knots.
‘How many people live on the island?’ she asked now, trying to compose herself for their arrival, and Mark frowned.
‘Let me see—well, there’s Monique and Henri. They’re the married couple who look after the villa. Monique does most of the cooking and cleaning, and Henri looks after the garden. My mother instructs them, of course. She’s Rob’s housekeeper.’
‘I see.’ Tobie digested this. ‘And—and that’s all?’
‘No. There are one or two of Monique and Henri’s offspring about the place. I think their eldest son is married, and he and his wife live down near the harbour and look after the boats. Then there’s Harvey Jennings, of course. He and his daughter live on the far side of the island. Rob bought the place from them, and he lets them stay here free gratis.’
Tobie glanced at him. ‘You don’t like them?’ she asked, responding to the censure in his voice, and Mark shrugged again.
‘I don’t like Harvey,’ he admitted. ‘He’s a sponger, always making out he’s hard up. He relies on Rob far too much. Cilla—well, she’s all right. Quite a nice girl, actually. She’s often at the villa. My mother likes her too. I know that Cilla comes over for different reasons, but there you are. Rob’s a likeable character.’
He shrugged, but it wasn’t difficult to understand his meaning, and Tobie was appalled by her own reactions to it. Even after all this time, she could still feel the agony of Robert’s desertion, and she doubted coming here was going to blunt the pain.
The aircraft landed, and Mark went to bid farewell to their pilot. He had introduced him to Tobie as Jim Matheson, and as they crossed the airstrip he explained that Robert and the pilot owned the plane jointly.
‘It’s a small business venture,’ he remarked, glancing back at the blue and white Cessna glinting in the sunlight. ‘They own half a dozen of these small aircraft, hiring them out for trips around the islands. You’d be surprised how many people enjoy island-hopping, as they call it. It’s quite a going concern.’
Tobie was impressed, or at least she hoped she appeared that way. Inside, she was a churning mass of tangled emotions, and the sight of the gleaming convertible, parked in the shade of a clump of palm trees, obviously waiting for them, filled her with real panic.
‘Mark!’
The affectionate calling of his name, accompanied by the sight of an elegant woman in her late fifties climbing out of the back of the vehicle, told its own story. Evidently, this was his mother, come to meet them, and Tobie breathed a little easier when she saw that the only other occupant of the car was black.
Mark allowed himself to be enveloped in a warm embrace, and over his shoulder Tobie met the strangely malevolent eyes of the woman who had deserted her eldest son when he was little more than seven years old. She had left her home, and her family, to run away with a man more than twice her age, and that was what had created the rift between her and Robert, the rift Tobie had never expected to see mended. Mark was her second husband’s son, of course, but his father was dead now. Mark had told her he had died of a heart attack soon after Marks’s eighteenth birthday, and it was this as much as anything which had turned his interest towards medicine. Robert’s own father had committed suicide. A week after the divorce was made absolute he had hanged himself in the summerhouse of their Kingston home, and Robert had been brought up by a series of nannies, acting under his aunt’s instructions. His own mother had made little effort to see him, too absorbed with her new life and her new baby, and it was only when Robert became famous that he began getting letters from her. Letters he had destroyed, so far as Tobie was aware—until the accident—
Standing there with the sun beating down upon her head, Tobie tried desperately to relax. She was here now. There was nothing she could do about it. And if Robert’s mother knew who she was, and that was why she was looking at her so hostilely, there was nothing she could do about that either. Perhaps Mrs Newman was merely jealous of her younger son’s affection. But if there was any other reason for her hostility, she would soon find out.
Mark was freeing himself from his mother’s embrace now, assuring her that they had had a good journey—that he was in the best of health—that he wasn’t working too hard—and that no, he hadn’t lost weight. He was obviously amused by his mother’s insistence, but as Tobie waited somewhat apprehensively to be introduced, she had the feeling that Mrs Newman’s delaying tactics were deliberate.
At last Mark succeeded in drawing her forward, and with evident pride he introduced her to his mother. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ he demanded, his arm possessively about Tobie’s shoulders. ‘I told you she was. Don’t you think I’m the luckiest man in the world?’
His mother viewed Tobie with cool