Читать книгу Where You Belong - Barbara Taylor Bradford - Страница 15

I must have dozed off and slept for a very long time, because when I awakened with a start the room was no longer filled with the bright sunlight of early afternoon.

Grey shadows lurked everywhere, curled around the bookshelves and the big Provençal armoire, slid across the ceiling and spilled down onto the walls.

The overwhelming greyness gave my normally cheerful bedroom a gloomy look, and involuntarily I shivered. Someone walked over my grave, I thought, as gooseflesh speckled my arms, and then I couldn’t help wondering why I’d thought of that particular and rather morbid analogy.

Glancing at the bedside clock, I saw that it was almost six. I couldn’t believe I’d been asleep for over four hours. Slipping off the bed I went and looked out of the big bay window.

The beautiful Paris sky of earlier was cloud-filled now and darkening rapidly, the sunny blue entirely obscured. Rain threatened. Perhaps there would be a storm. I turned on the lamp which stood on the bureau plat, and sudden bright light flooded across the photograph of Tony in its silver frame. It had been taken by Jake last year when we had been on vacation together in southern France. I stared down at it for a long moment, and then I turned away, filled with sadness.

Sometimes I couldn’t bear to look at it. He was so full of life in this particular shot, his hair blowing in the wind, his teeth very white and gleaming in his tanned face, those merry black eyes narrowed against the sunlight as he squinted back at the camera.

Tony stood on the deck of the sloop on which we were sailing that vacation, the white sails above him billowing out in the breeze. How carefree he looked, bare-chested in his white tennis shorts. A man in his prime, obviously loving that he was so virile. You could see this just by looking at the expression on his face, the wide, confident smile on his mouth.

I sighed under my breath and reached out to steady myself against the desk, and then I moved slowly across the floor, retreating from the window area.

His son Rory had taken possession of Tony’s body once it had arrived in England, and the boy had taken it on to Ireland. To County Wicklow. There Tony had been buried next to his parents.

Rory would be at the memorial service, wouldn’t he?

That question hovered around in my head for a moment. Of course he would. And so perhaps I would finally get to meet the son Tony had had such pride in and loved so much.

I lay down on the bed again, and curled up in a ball, thoughts of Tony uppermost once more. Absently I twisted his ring on my finger, then glanced down at it. A wide gold band, Grecian in design, set with aquamarines.

‘The colour of your eyes,’ he’d said the day he’d chosen it, not so long ago. ‘They’re not blue, not grey, not green, but pale, pale turquoise. You have sea eyes, Val, eyes the colour of the sea.’

Pushing my face in the pillow, I forced back the tears which were welling suddenly.

‘Mavourneen mine,’ I heard him whisper against my cheek, and I sighed again as I felt his hand touching my face, my neck, and then smoothing down over my breast…

Snapping my eyes wide open, I sat up with a jolt, got off the bed and hurried into the bathroom. Pressing my face against the glass wall of the shower stall, I told myself I must pull myself together, must stop thinking about him in that way…stop thinking about him sexually. I’ve got to get over him, he’s not coming back. He’s dead. And buried. Gone from this life. But I knew I couldn’t help myself. I knew that his memory would be always loitering in my mind, lingering in my heart. Haunting me.