Pel sat back in his chair and smiled knowingly. ‘Ah, it’s like that, is it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Freya stiffly.
‘You and Max had a thing together, didn’t you?’
‘What on earth makes you think that?’ she asked with an unsuccessful laugh.
‘Intuition,’ said Pel smugly. ‘Plus the fact that your face goes all funny when you talk about him.’
Involuntarily, Freya’s hands went to her cheeks. ‘It does not!’
‘Yes, it does.’ Narrowing his eyes, Pel pretended to peer mystically into the bottom of his glass. ‘I’m getting the sense that you made a bit of a fool of yourself over this Max,’ he said portentously.
Freya eyed him sourly. Pel was just a little too clever for his own good, sometimes. ‘Very funny,’ she said, un-amused.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ He leant conspiratorially towards her. ‘Come on, Freya, ’fess up!’
She hesitated, moving her glass around on the bar until she had a pattern of interlocking rings. Pel would never let it go now that he had the whiff of a secret. ‘You must promise not to tell anyone else,’ she said at last.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die!’
‘It was at Lucy’s twenty-first,’ she began reluctantly. ‘It was a great party, but I’d had a terrible row with my first real boyfriend that afternoon, and I was in a bad way. I didn’t want to spoil Lucy’s day, though, so I pretended that Alan was on emergency call and couldn’t make it. It was awful.’
Freya shuddered at the memory and took a slug of gin. ‘I had to pretend to be having a fantastic time when all I wanted to do was go home and cry. I really thought Alan was the love of my life, and I couldn’t think about life without him.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Pel. ‘You had too much to drink?’
She sighed. ‘If you know so much, why am I telling you this?’
‘Because I want to know where the mysterious Max fits in. Go on!’
‘Well, Max was there, of course. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. He’d just come back from Africa, and he looked really different.’
Freya paused, her mind going back six years. Max had looked taller and more solid than she’d remembered, and older than his twenty-seven years. After a couple of years in the African sun, his grey eyes had been startlingly, even shockingly light in his brown face. Freya could still remember the tiny jerk of her heart when she had recognised him across the room.
‘He wasn’t enjoying himself either, but then he was never a party animal,’ she remembered. ‘I could see him watching me occasionally with that disapproving expression of his—that was exactly the same as I remembered—but he didn’t say a word to me until I got to the point when I didn’t think I could bear it for a second more. He came over and just said that I’d had enough to drink, and that he was taking me home.’
‘Mmm…the masterful type?’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Freya, grimacing into her glass at the memory. ‘I tried to tell him I didn’t want to go, but he just ignored me, and the next thing I knew I was being frog-marched out to his car.’
Pel was leaning forward, agog. ‘Did he make a pass at you?’
‘Worse,’ said Freya tersely.
‘Worse?’ Pel’s eyes were out on stalks. ‘My God, what did he do?’
‘It wasn’t what he did. It was what I did.’ Her cheeks were burning and she pressed her hands to her face. ‘I tried to flirt with him.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Max is completely unflirtable.’
It was obvious that Pel was disappointed. He had been expecting something more dramatic. ‘Was that it?’
‘No, then I started to cry.’ Freya took a long pull of gin, trying not to cringe at the memory. ‘I told him all about Alan and how much I loved him and how my life was in ruins. It was pathetic!’
‘Tears? Oh, dear.’ Pel’s mouth turned down at the corners in sympathy. ‘What did Max do?’
‘He just let me snivel while he drove me home.’ She could see Max now, standing on her doorstep, holding out his hand for her key, which she had meekly handed over. ‘When we got there, he made me drink a vat of water until I’d sobered up. He sat on the sofa next to me and told me about living in Africa while I drank glass after glass.
‘It was the first I’d heard about Mbanazere,’ she went on, a distant expression in her green eyes. ‘I remember Max telling me about staying in a hotel by the Indian Ocean and eating crab mayonnaise sandwiches under the palm trees. He made it sound so…so magical, I suppose, that I got caught up in the whole thing, like a dream. It’s the only way I can explain it.’
‘Explain what?’
Freya fiddled with her glass. ‘It was really strange, but as he talked I suddenly began to find him irresistible. One minute I was rambling on about being dumped by Alan and the next I could hardly keep my hands off Max. It was bizarre! I mean, I’d never found him remotely attractive before, but it was like being possessed. I honestly couldn’t do anything about it.’
She squirmed, remembering how she had tried to slide seductively along the sofa, only to spoil the effect by toppling against him. The way Max had frozen as she whispered huskily in his ear. That heart-stopping pause before his arms had come round her and pulled her down onto the cushions.
‘I must have been completely blootered,’ she said, shifting uncomfortably on her stool.
But not so blootered that she couldn’t remember everything that had happened then in extraordinary detail.
‘Everyone has embarrassing moments like that,’ Pel tried to console her, seeing her scarlet cheeks. ‘I remember when—well, never mind. The thing is, it could have been a lot worse. It’s not as if you—’
He broke off as he noticed Freya’s expression. ‘Ah,’ he said in belated realisation. ‘You did?’
She nodded.
There was a pause. Pel cleared his throat. ‘So what happened? Afterwards, I mean,’ he added hastily.
‘Nothing.’ Freya concentrated on twisting the glass between her fingers. ‘Max couldn’t wait to leave. Said it had been a mistake, and that it would be better if we both pretended that it had never happened. Which was fine by me.
‘I mean, it was a relief,’ she went on, very conscious that she sounded as if she were still trying to convince herself. ‘I’d been lying there, wondering how I was going to face him in the morning. He was Lucy’s brother. It was practically incest.’
Pel snorted. ‘Rubbish!’
‘That’s what it felt like,’ she insisted. ‘It wasn’t even as I’d ever liked him that much. He was certainly never the stuff of my adolescent fantasies. He’s not bad-looking, but there’s nothing special about him either, and he was always too serious and stuffy to have any fun. He used to look down his nose at Lucy and me, and make the kind of cutting remarks that you never quite knew how to take.’
Freya brooded into her glass, thinking about Max and his uncanny ability to make her feel stupid. ‘Anyway, I was perfectly happy to pretend that it had never happened. Max obviously wished it hadn’t, and so did I.’
‘Really?’