Circles of Fate Read online

  “From the age of six it has been my burning ambition to get here. So you could say it’s taken me sixteen years to achieve this day. I didn’t expect to spend my first night in such uncomfortable circumstances. I think – do you mind? – I’m going to cry.”

  TWO

  “But what did you do up there?” demanded Edward Selby. “Or more to the point, what did that Spaniard fellow do?”

  “He massaged my foot when it got pins and needles, and he lent me his hankie when I wanted to cry. Edward Selby, what do you think he did?”

  Edward Selby. She had always thought the name had a dignified ring to it. Now she thought it pompous, as pompous as the expression on his face. Yet it was the pomposity of a hurt child. He’d waited hours at the airfield, which must have been frustrating for him because in some aspects he was as restless as an unfed lion. But he made up for this in lots of other ways. There wasn’t a man on earth, she thought, who would be prepared to give so much and expect so little in return. He gave all of himself, in the name of friendship. He put his strength and his warmth at her disposal and yet he acted with the decorum of a nineteenth-century suitor. It had taken him all his time to be persuaded to enter her hotel bedroom, the room which he had booked for her, had perhaps kicked up a fuss over, insisting that he got this one with a miniature balcony overlooking a tree-lined square. He fought other people’s battles so much better than he fought his own. Even so, he kept his eyes carefully averted so as not to look at the bed.

  So far he hadn’t kissed her (perhaps he thought it not quite fitting in her bedroom), but when he did she knew exactly what kind of kiss it would be. A passionless peck on her cheek and, if she were lucky, he might also give her a quick hug.

  How could she know her own feelings when they were not put to the test? Could any man arouse in her an all-consuming passion that overwhelmed and excited and blotted out everything except his own face and hands and body? Or was such an emotion an unreal fancy, an impossible achievement?

  If only she knew. If only Edward would just once kiss her as though she were not his favourite niece.

  “Did he touch you at all?” said Edward, stodgily going over the same ground.

  “Yes. He touched my left foot. Have you ever noticed what an amorous left foot I’ve got?” A sprightly smile touched her mouth and her throat sent out a laugh that went scurrying to the elaborately moulded ceiling, and her eyes sparkled with merriment.

  “Darling, don’t be so old and stuffy.”

  At that moment she looked like a naughty elf, a very infantile elf, he thought.

  “I am old and age is stuffy.”

  She tended to forget that he had been her mother’s friend and her mother’s contemporary. Possibly because he didn’t look his age. She went back in her mind to the day they got engaged, if one could call their odd arrangement an engagement.

  “You need a holiday,” he had told her. “You’ve worked like a Trojan these past months. You desperately need a break.”

  “It doesn’t seem right. My mother –”

  “Inez would be the first to understand,” he finished for her. “Go abroad, get right out of the country, that would be a real change.”

  “It would be a real challenge. I don’t know whether I dare – go alone, that is.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you went alone.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s all right. I’m not proposing anything improper. If it will make you feel any better, you could wear this.” Then he had produced the ring, a square-cut sapphire on a raised shoulder of platinum-set diamonds. Its flamboyance suited her long slender fingers. Fingers which were once at home poised over an ivory keyboard, sending professional notes ringing into the corners of high-ceilinged halls.

  She was about to draw the ring back over her knuckle, when he stopped her.

  “If nothing else, wear it as a mark of respectability. I don’t see why we shouldn’t go on holiday together.”

  “Has the ring any other significance, besides respectability?” she had asked, thinking what an Edwardian Edward he was to think that two people had to be engaged before they went on holiday together.

  His glance raked hers searchingly. “It has a very special significance.”

  Perhaps he read the doubt in her eyes, because he rounded his question – proposal – off with a careless: “Let us leave the heavy side of it in abeyance. Allow me the pleasure of your company. That is if you think you can bear with an old man?”

  “You’re not old,” she had told him then.

  “You’re not old,” she told him now. “I think age is a silly obsession, anyway.” She took his huge hands in hers, pulling them round her waist; she tipped back her head to look up into his face. It was the first time she had taken the initiative with any man and she felt breathless and daring, but it did not stifle her forebodings.

  “Edward, don’t let’s stay. I’ve got the strangest feeling that the island doesn’t welcome us.”

  “The island doesn’t welcome us? That’s ridiculous!”

  “No, it isn’t. Nothing’s gone right from the start. First we couldn’t get seats on the same plane –”

  “Only because we booked at the last minute. Anyway, it worked out rather well. I was able to come on ahead and make the hotel reservations. You do like your room?”

  “Love it. But please don’t sidestep the issue. My plane did develop engine trouble and had to crash-land, and if that isn’t an omen, I don’t know what is.”

  “I do believe – you are deadly serious!”

  “Yes, Edward. I am. Thank you for not laughing at me and please, please listen to me. Let’s take the first plane out, no matter where it’s going.”

  He transferred his hands from her narrow waist and placed one on either side of her face. His tawny eyes searched hers.

  “Is this your silly obsession, Anita? As you are so fond of reminding me, we all have one. Inez chose never to come back here. Considering how much she loved this place, I always thought that was a strange reluctance on her part, a fear almost. What was it she feared? What notion has she passed on to you?”

  “None. Now you are being ridiculous.”

  But was he? It was true that her mother had shown a curious reluctance to return to her beloved island. It was as Edward had said, almost as though she feared something.

  Once, many years ago, she had discovered her mother weeping over what they called their memory trunk. In this trunk they stacked their mementoes. Programmes and newspaper cuttings and photographs, sepia with age. Her mother’s combs of ivory, and lace mantillas so exquisite and fragile that Anita was afraid to touch them and revered them with her eyes. And scraps of material: stiff emerald brocade and rich ruby-red silk. Embroidered slippers and hand-painted fans, and a crocheted shawl as fine as a handful of mist. But it was a baby’s bootee that Inez pressed to her heart as her mouth opened on a broken anguish of words.

  “Retribution. Cruel retribution.”

  “Mother?” a much younger and extremely perplexed Anita had said.

  “It’s all right, my child. I’m behaving in a stupid way. After all, I have so much to be thankful for. I have you.”

  But as she wrapped the bootee in its protective covering of tissue-paper, her eyes contained an infinite sadness.

  It didn’t make sense to Anita. What was her mother weeping over and regretting? The baby that was no more? But surely that baby is me? thought Anita. And it wasn’t as though her mother had that sort of besotted devotion that wanted to keep a baby in a prolonged and unnatural state of infant dependency. She’d seen women cooing over pink or blue bonneted cherubs in prams, had heard them say, “Isn’t he – or she – lovely. What a pity they can’t stay babies for ever!” Her mother hadn’t been like that.

  “You were a wonderful baby,” she had told Anita countless times. “Very forward for your age. You sat up unaided at six months and walked at eleven months. But I didn’t begin to enjoy you until you started school. I don
’t think children are interesting until they have passed their sixth birthday.”

  A finger and thumb snapped in front of her eyes. She blinked and Edward’s leonine head came back into focus. He was a big friendly beast of a man, with fierce yellow hair. His eyes were full of compassion as he said: “This isn’t like you, Anita. I’ve always admired the way you face up to realities. And this isn’t even a reality, but a long-forgotten ghost from somebody else’s past.”

  “But that somebody was so closely linked with me that it’s also my past, my ghost.”

  “I still say you don’t have to run away from it. Simply let it rest.”

  “I want to. I don’t want to stir up the dust of old times.” But the dust was already stirring. She could taste it in her throat.

  “Edward!”

  “No, Anita,” he said, rejecting her urgent plea. “I refuse to run because of a childish whim. You’re tired. You’ve had a bad experience. It’s little wonder you are overwrought.”

  She clamped shut her mouth. She would plead no more. Also she feared that Edward was partly right. To speak at the moment would be to struggle for coherence.

  He coaxed: “Put on your nightie and get into bed.”

  “I can’t,” she said stiffly. “My nightie is in the overnight bag I left on the plane.”

  “Then slip into bed without it. And then –” Suddenly she wanted to pay him back for his indifference, his insensitivity. She wanted to torment him. Her eyes raised steadily to his.

  “And then?”

  A faint pink prickled his skin and just for a second he had the look of a man who carried an intolerable burden. “And then, when you’ve had your sleep, we’ll go shopping. We’ll shop for all the things you didn’t pack into the big case which, luckily, I brought on ahead for you. That is, if your ankle will permit it.”

  “I’ve already told you, it feels much better.” A shiver of guilt ran down her spine. Not only was it wrong to tease Edward, it was a mistake. And yet he would treat her like a child!

  His hand was on the knob of the door, preparatively, when she called him back. “Edward, I’m twenty-two.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that I’ve grown up. I’m a woman.”

  “I know you’re a woman.”

  “Do you? I’ve wondered. I’ve been tempted to show you my birth certificate.”

  He came back into the centre of the room. He seemed to bristle with interest. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I haven’t been able to find it.”

  A frown touched his forehead. “Wasn’t it with your mother’s insurance policies and other important documents?”

  “No. If I ever need to produce my birth certificate, I shall have to write for a copy.”

  “But you have needed to produce it. When you applied for your passport, prior to this holiday.”

  “No, I didn’t. I already had my passport.” He still looked puzzled, so she explained: “When Mother first took ill, we thought it was something or nothing, and that she needed a holiday. We decided on France – Mother expressed a wish to tour the Loire Valley. But, although the preparations were well advanced, it was not to be.”

  “I take it Inez did all the arranging. You didn’t actually see your birth certificate?”

  “Yes, to the first. No, to the second. Is it important?”

  “No, of course not.” He made an exasperated self-deprecatory gesture.

  “It seems to be a habit I’ve got into. Picking the conversation to the bone.”

  It seemed very quiet when he’d gone. She closed the shutters and took off her clothes and hurried herself between coarse white sheets that smelt of the sun. The room should have been deliciously cool with the shutters closed. It was shaded in a green twilight, but it was still warm. She wiped the dampness from her forehead with the back of her hand. Everybody said that when she turned her back on music, she had renounced the vital part of her life. But they were wrong, because her mother’s going had done that. Something tight and solid began to unknot and dissolve, and she could cry. She couldn’t find her handkerchief, so she wiped her tears on the coarse white sheet that smelt of the sun. Edward had told her to cry, but she had insisted that she wasn’t a crier, and yet she had cried yesterday on a strange man’s shoulder and she was crying today in a strange bed.

  Edward understood. Did he miss her mother, too? Was that the reason ... she made herself go on, the reason for his tender concern that always stopped short of blossoming into the intimate interest a man feels for a woman? Did she need to be as tender with him as he was with her? The shock-thought stopped her tears. Lovely as she was, she had never thought of her mother as a woman desirable to men. Daughters never do. And, of course, her mother had never shown a spark of interest in any man other than the husband she’d lost after only four months of marriage. Anita thought her father must have been a remarkable man to have inspired such constancy and devotion.

  Their courtship had not been an easy one. Inez had been protected and guarded as though she were a rare jewel. In her father’s eyes she was. His only child, how proud he must have felt when he offered her hand in marriage to the son of his best friend. Inez did not welcome the marriage but she accepted it, as she accepted the country’s dictate that a young lady of good breeding is not free to choose her own husband. Honour demanded that she respect her parents’ wishes, and so she resolved to make her chosen novio a good and obedient wife, hoping perhaps that love would come later as it sometimes did in an arranged marriage.

  She knew it was wrong to look at the handsome young Englishman. She slid him the briefest of glances, knowing that reputations, and hearts, have been lost for less. The one glance became two, and three, and four. Their meetings, because inevitably they did meet, were brief and clandestine, and after each one Inez wept because she was extraordinarily pure. No man’s hands had even as much as spanned her waist and now she was not only allowing a man to make love to her (in the most innocent sense of the word) but responding hungrily to his kisses. Then suddenly the kisses weren’t enough. It must have slain the sweet young Inez to permit a deeper intimacy, but she was very much in love and so she risked the wrath and ruination that was eventually her lot.

  Her father called her a reckless, sinful girl, but he attended the hastily arranged wedding, and his heavily lidded eyes contained a shine that looked suspiciously like tears.

  Anita never knew for certain whether it was shame that kept Inez from her father’s house, or whether it was because he requested it. Once, curiosity pushed Anita to ask. But no reply was forthcoming. Instead she was told to practise her scales.

  She remembered climbing up on to the old piano stool and feeling the piano keys cold beneath her fingers. Soon, the painfully picked-out notes blotted out her thoughts. Even then, crucifying music, she had loved it. Perhaps one day she might take it up again. She had lost too much time to hope to pick up where she had left off and, in any case, she no longer had the dedication to achieve her earlier ambitions. But, she could still make music her profession, in a teaching capacity perhaps.

  She slept then. She must have been very tired because she slept through the recognized hours of siesta and into the hours of evening. When she drew back the shutters the sky was no longer full of yellow glare, but radiated a gentle, fading light, and the horizon was brushed with shades of afterglow. Very exciting, very dramatic; she felt not only newly awakened, but vitally alive.

  The telephone, situated on the table by her bed, suddenly rang. Her heels clicked sharply on the tiled floor as she went to answer it. Anticipating the caller would be Edward to query how long she was going to be, she said: “We can go and buy my toothbrush now. I’m dressed. I’ve even got my shoes on.”

  “Really? Both shoes? I’m delighted to hear it. It means your ankle must be better.”

  “It is. Almost. But that isn’t Edward.”

  “No.”

  That ‘no’ tumbled into her senses with the swee
tness of wine.

  “Felipe?” The recognition in her voice must have made him smile because it was spiced with ecstasy.

  “I rang to enquire after your health, but, I wonder, may I be permitted to escort you on your shopping expedition? For a toothbrush, you said?”

  “And certain other necessary items.”

  “I won’t ask what items.”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if you did. And I’m sorry, but I’ve already got an escort.”

  “Of course. Edward.”

  “Yes, Edward.”

  “In that case, adiós.”

  “Adiós,” she said wistfully.

  She had only just replaced the receiver when a knock sounded on the door. This time it was Edward.

  “Edward, why did you want to come to Leyenda?”

  “I didn’t. You did.”

  “No, Edward. You were equally as enthusiastic.”

  He smiled at her over the rim of his glass, took a sip of his Spanish wine. Admitted: “Perhaps.”

  “You do admit it then.”

  “Nothing so definite. Although –”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I can’t say Inez hasn’t whetted my appetite. She was a great one for indulging in reminiscences, you know, and she talked of her home so vividly that I felt I’d lived here too. When I first arrived it was just like revisiting a well-loved place.”

  “I know. I felt it too. But eerily.”

  “And yet, I think I would have known this island even if Inez hadn’t brought it to life for me. It is the unattainable dream in each of our hearts. And why should it be? Unattainable, I mean. Why can’t one use one’s prior knowledge to materialistic advantage and give Mr and Mrs Everybody their secret dream?”

  “Edward, I don’t care much for your acquisitive look. Exactly what do you have in mind?” But she knew what he had in mind. His fins didn’t show, but undoubtedly he was one of the sharks Felipe had spoken of.

  His hands smacked down on top of hers with a suddenness that made her jump quite violently. “Claim Casa Esmeralda. Give your tenant notice to quit. Exploit your inheritance.”