Читать книгу Bittersweet Yesterdays - Kate Proctor - Страница 5

BY THE time they were seated in the restaurant, Lucy was feeling as miserable physically as she was mentally. Without her scarf, a voluminous cashmere wrap which had been a birthday present from her mother and James, she was frozen; and without her boots her feet had been soaked in the rain.

‘No wonder you’re cold,’ said Mark unsympathetically, catching her shiver, despite the warmth surrounding them, as he finished giving their order. ‘You’re not exactly dressed for December weather.’

‘Only because you didn’t give me time to get changed into something suitable,’ snapped Lucy, acutely conscious of a completely new dimension to the edgy tension she generally experienced in his company, yet unable to pinpoint its cause.

‘As your coat was all you claimed to have with you,’ he replied in innocent tones, ‘I can only assume you’re complaining I didn’t give you time to go home and change—and that’s hardly a reasonable complaint.’

‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ she demanded wearily. She knew this patronisingly innocent mood of his of old, and it was one that more often than not reduced her to gibbering rage.

‘Perhaps I should have ordered you a brandy to warm you up,’ he murmured, disregarding her words totally. ‘You have, I take it, learned to hold your liquor by now?’

Lucy was mortified to feel her cheeks flame.

‘Ha, ha,’ she ground out, inwardly squirming. At sixteen she had, quite by accident, managed to get herself well and truly drunk on an innocuous-tasting punch she had unfortunately assumed to be a concoction of nothing but fruit juices.

‘How old were you at the time?’ enquired Mark, once again displaying that disconcerting knack of reading her mind.

‘Sixteen,’ snapped Lucy, then rounded on him bitterly. ‘And if you hadn’t dragged me along to that wretched do, only to dump me in a corner and order me to blend in with the wallpaper, I wouldn’t have spent the entire evening drinking in order to relieve the boredom!’

‘Is there nothing you’ve ever done that hasn’t been someone else’s fault?’ he asked, his tone as icy as the eyes contemptuously holding hers across the table as the waiters arrived. ‘And just in case you were thinking of replying, don’t bother,’ he informed her, once they had been served. ‘In fact, I’d be grateful if you didn’t utter another word until I’ve finished my entire meal. I’ve no intention of risking an ulcer by subjecting myself to your petulant outbursts while I’m eating.’

There was something different about him, thought Lucy nervously, feeling like a severely reprimanded child. It was around two years since she had spent any time in his company, she mused, and also since his father had handed the entire business empire over to him. And before that there had been a similar gap between their meetings.

She picked at her food half-heartedly, startled to realise how long those gaps had been—not that time had ever lessened the intensity of the all-out war that had always existed between them. She frowned, giving an imperceptible shake of her head as she remembered that it hadn’t always been total war between them. From around the time she was seventeen and well into her eighteenth year, they had almost got on well, she realised with a sharp pang of nostalgia—admittedly they had still argued, but not with the venom of the earlier years and certainly not as they were to in the years that followed. And that strange period, almost of truce, had taken place during the time when his father had been reassessing the London offices and when he and her mother had, for the first time since their marriage, actually lived for a while in London.

Mark had still been a student, and younger than she was now, when he had been forced into the role of virtual guardian to a stroppy fifteen-year-old, and how bitterly he had resented it, she thought with a curiously tender pang of understanding. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the only time they had almost got on was when her mother and his father had been around to relieve him of that onerous burden they themselves had placed on him. It was definitely when James and her mother left England again that hostilities had flared up between them with renewed intensity...even though she was old enough to stand on her own two feet—well, almost—by then.

Her mind still wrestling with such thoughts, she gazed furtively across the table at her silent companion and in that instant her mind blanked, only to be filled by sudden, searing memories of his lips on hers.

For heaven’s sake, all he’d done was kiss her, she remonstrated frantically with herself—except that it was so out of character that it had obviously thrown even him. But one thing she could be sure of—if ever he got any inkling of the effect that kiss had had on her, he would use it as a weapon against her without the slightest compunction!

‘Would you like coffee?’ he asked, finally breaking the silence.

Lucy nodded, her mind still resisting her efforts to clear it of the memories it seemed determined to dwell on.

He summoned a waiter, then didn’t speak again until the table was cleared and the coffee served.

‘About two and a half years ago, my father underwent major surgery for a stomach disorder,’ he then stated quietly.

Lucy looked at him in shocked disbelief.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘Probably because they felt you had enough to contend with at the time—that is, being plastered all over the Press as a gangster’s moll.’

‘Mark, you know you’re not being fair.’ As she was still stunned by his disclosure, her protest was mild. ‘I hardly knew the man—I just happened to be having lunch with him when he was arrested. And as for it being plastered all over the—’

‘Perhaps not here; but it was in the States, where the man was wanted on several charges,’ he muttered. ‘And you can imagine how it must have speeded my father’s recovery once the American Press dug up your link with him and brought his name into it all.’

He wasn’t being in the least fair, but Lucy was still too preoccupied by thoughts of her stepfather, of whom she had gradually grown very fond, to react.

‘Lucy, you’re right—I wasn’t being fair,’ he sighed. ‘But to get back to Dad’s operation; by all medical expectations it should have returned him to his old self—but unfortunately it didn’t.’

Lucy gazed at him aghast. ‘That rumpus I was involved in...are you saying it affected him that badly?’

‘Of course I’m not,’ he exclaimed, then startled her by giving her a wry grin. ‘Though I’d be lying if I said the thought never entered my mind.’ His expression reverted to one of seriousness. ‘Lucy, don’t tell me you didn’t find it odd that he should hand over the company to me, and opt out of all involvement with it, so early. It was something he had always intended doing eventually, but certainly not in his early fifties!’

Lucy hoped her expression wasn’t betraying her thoughts. She had had one or two thoughts on the subject of James handing over his empire lock, stock and barrel to his son—and none of them in the least charitable towards Mark—but the idea of poor health having any bearing on it simply hadn’t entered her head.

‘He did it because he realised he lacked the physical stamina to continue. It got so that a full round of golf was more than he could handle—and you know how he is about his golf.’

‘This is dreadful,’ whispered Lucy, feeling suddenly limp and trembly. ‘If only someone had had the sense to tell me. The things I’ve said to them! I virtually accused them of acting like a couple of couch potatoes! I spent last Christmas with them—at that place they suddenly bought in the Seychelles. I just couldn’t understand how they could sit around all day playing cards when there was so much to do there...I feel terrible!’

He gave a small shrug. ‘You weren’t to know—and anyway, it doesn’t matter. Give him a while and he’ll be back to his old energetic self.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘One of the reasons he bought that place in the Seychelles was that he’d had enough of being treated like some sort of medical specimen by the team that had originally operated on him. I suppose you couldn’t blame them really. When such relatively routine surgery produces unheard-of results like that, they’re bound to want to know why. But after the last extensive going-over they gave him, he’d had enough.’

‘Has the climate there cured him or something?’ asked Lucy tentatively.

He laughed as he shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But with what they had from the last batch of tests, his doctors have finally cracked it—and it took some doing. I’ve no idea what the medical jargon is, but it appears Dad’s innards aren’t quite as they should be according to the textbooks. It’s a minor deviation which, ironically, wouldn’t have affected him a jot had he not had to have precisely the surgery he did have a couple of years ago.’

‘But they can cure it now they know?’

He nodded. ‘Unfortunately it involves another hefty bout of surgery. But once he’s over that, he really will be back to normal this time.’

‘When will he have the operation?’

‘In the New Year. In fact, they’re flying back to the States the day after New Year and he’ll be operated on a day or two later.’

‘Mark...I’m so glad,’ whispered Lucy almost shyly. ‘I know I used to say how much I hated him when they were first married...I suppose it was a confused sort of loyalty to my own father. But over the years I’ve grown very fond of him.’

‘Loyalty such as that is perfectly understandable,’ he muttered. ‘It took a long time for me to admit it even to myself, but your mother’s the best thing that could have happened to him. After my mother died, he just went to pieces.’ He broke off and shifted slightly in his chair, the movement uncharacteristically tense and awkward. ‘It was in that state that he ended up married—briefly, thank God—to an archetypal gold-digger. It was unfortunate but inevitable that I should regard your mother as being a similar type.’

It was only when he glanced around and motioned to a waiter to bring more coffee that Lucy realised he had said all he intended. No apology; no admission of any feelings even approaching warmth for the woman who had borne his open hostility with such fortitude—only that grudging statement.

‘So why are you telling me all this now?’ she asked, anger and resentment simmering within her. ‘I’m amazed I haven’t been left in total ignorance as usual.’

‘This time I intend making sure you stay out of trouble—and with your full co-operation. I don’t want anything—and I mean not the slightest thing—causing him any unwarranted stress while he’s going through this.’

‘And you really expect me to believe you don’t blame me for his failure to recover last time?’ exploded Lucy bitterly, unable to believe she was being treated like this.

‘Your infantile sensibilities aren’t of the slightest interest to me,’ he drawled, the boredom in his tone complemented by his eyes, which then left her to follow the progress of the extremely attractive woman walking past their table. ‘The only thing I’m interested in,’ he continued, though apparently having difficulty dragging his eyes temporarily back to Lucy, ‘is the next couple of months being as stress-free as possible for my father.’

‘Oh, dear,’ drawled Lucy, the blood boiling in her as she suspected he had succeeded in making some sort of eye-contact with the woman who, with her companion, had taken a table not quite in her line of vision somewhere to the left of theirs. ‘It looks as though I’m going to have to say goodbye to my dishy drug baron boyfriend—what a shame.’

The look he gave her was such that for an instant she was scared he was going to lunge across the table and throttle her.

‘You come out with remarks like that,’ he rasped, controlling himself with patent difficulty, ‘and yet you wonder why I feel the need to make sure I’ve got you right where I can keep close watch on you.’

‘I take it you’re referring to my new secretarial position,’ exclaimed Lucy with a dismissive laugh. ‘I hope you realise that any day now you’ll be kicking yourself for not having hung on to one of those you so rashly discarded.’

‘There was never any question of any one of them remaining with me,’ he informed her coldly. ‘I certainly don’t expect you to have the first idea about how this consortium runs—and I don’t simply mean the London offices, I mean the whole shebang worldwide; but that’s what I’ve been spending the past two years familiarising myself with. I don’t just look around the companies, or the various sections of the larger ones. Where feasible, and where the executives concerned are in agreement, I actually go in and run the particular section myself for a short period. That’s the only way to gain in-depth knowledge of what’s involved. And when I do that it’s only logical that I should borrow the secretary to the chief executive of the particular area concerned.’

‘Oh—I see,’ murmured Lucy with venomous sweetness. ‘I’d better put all those gossip-mongers straight by pointing out to them that all those secretaries they claim you’ve wined and dined out of office hours were working overtime to bring you up to date with your own business—and it was only coincidental that they happened to be the most attractive of the bunch.’ She glanced across at him smugly, only to find his attention had yet again strayed to the nearby table. ‘Mark, why don’t you simply draw up a chair and join them?’ she hissed viciously. ‘I’m sure her companion won’t object when you explain that all you’re interested in is familiarising yourself with wherever it is she works!’

The instant her words were out his eyes met hers, their goading mockery telling her he had been flirting for no other reason than to see how, if at all, she would react—and she had reacted all right, she accused herself angrily.

‘You sound almost jealous, sweetheart,’ he drawled, obviously determined to rub as much salt as he could into her wound.

‘I’ve told you not to call me sweetheart,’ she snapped in a vain attempt to divert to him some of her fury with herself for having fallen so easily into his trap.

‘So you did—but you don’t deny you were jealous,’ he murmured mockingly. ‘Tell me, Lucy, isn’t it about time you were thinking of finding some poor unfortunate to settle down with?’

‘Perhaps you’d like me to draw up a list so that you can have them thoroughly vetted,’ she retorted hotly. ‘I mean, that’s what you’d do, isn’t it?’

‘But of course,’ he agreed, startling her with a smile. ‘I couldn’t just hand you over to any Tom, Dick or Harry, now could I? Or George, Fred or Henry, for that matter.’

* * *

‘Your stepbrother!’ gasped Sarah Mitson from where she sat curled up in an armchair in Lucy’s flat that evening.

‘That’s what I’ve just said,’ snapped Lucy, feeling drained and miserable and not in the least up to the detailed explanations she knew Sarah was determined to drag from her. ‘My mother’s married to his father.’

‘Heck, Lucy, to think you’ve had the droolingly delicious Mark Waterford as a stepbrother and never breathed a word of it to me—to anyone!’

‘Sarah—please,’ begged Lucy wearily. ‘Just let me do my explaining and stop interrupting, will you?’

Sarah managed to keep her interruptions down to a few tuts and gasps for far longer than either of them would have thought possible, but eventually she broke.

‘Hang on a minute, Lucy,’ she begged. ‘That’s some accident—how exactly did you manage to set the school on fire?’

‘It wasn’t the actual school,’ muttered Lucy. ‘It’s a bit difficult to explain, but the back of the stage in the school hall was in an old wing—part of the original building going way back. It was like a junk room with old scenery from plays and moth-eaten theatrical costumes that no one had got around to throwing out littering the place. Everyone swore that wing was haunted and the reason it was such a mess was that even the staff were too scared to give it a thorough clearing out.’

‘Did you believe it was haunted?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I told the other girls I didn’t, though I wish to goodness I never had,’ she sighed. ‘I got myself involved in a ridiculous bet with a couple of them which ended up in my agreeing to do a tour of the place...after midnight and by candle-light.’

‘You must have been out of your mind,’ gasped Sarah.

‘I almost was by the time I’d been in there a couple of minutes,’ shivered Lucy. ‘I’d taken two candles, just in case one blew out...I honestly can’t remember clearly what happened, except that I tripped over something and set a paper screen on fire. I was busily trying to put it out when one of the hampers of clothes next to me just went up—I don’t know whether I dropped the other candle into it, or what...luckily the alarm system went off.’

‘How did Mark Waterford react when you eventually explained?’ asked Sarah, her look tentative.

‘He didn’t—because I didn’t,’ muttered Lucy, all this dredging up of the past making her feel wretched and depressed.

‘You certainly seem to have had a screwball relationship with him—that’s for sure,’ observed Sarah diffidently, plainly thrown by that disclosure.

Screwball was one word for it, reflected Lucy bitterly. From the start she and Mark had always seemed to bring out the worst in one another—though, as he had been the adult and she the virtual child, surely it had been up to him to attempt rectifying that, she reasoned defensively. Yet as she continued with her story, she noted with growing discomfort, and not a little resentment, how unusually pensive her normally ebullient friend was becoming.

‘That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been able to tell any of my friends.’ Lucy broke off, then added despondently, ‘I knew no one would understand. And you don’t—I can tell from your face, Sarah!’

‘But I am trying to,’ protested Sarah. ‘Most kids of that age get into scrapes and rebel against the figure of authority in their lives, but I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for your stepbrother, being left on the receiving end of it all. If I’d been him I’d have been fuming to have had the stroppy daughter of my father’s new wife suddenly dumped on me.’

‘You make it sound as though they boarded me out with him,’ protested Lucy. ‘I was at boarding-school to begin with—he was only there as a name for the authorities to contact if anything went wrong.’

‘And I can imagine just how much you’d resent that,’ murmured Sarah wryly, ‘and how you’d plot to cross him whenever the opportunity arose.’

‘Perhaps some of the minor scrapes I got into were simply to rile Mark,’ Lucy admitted with a sigh. This was the second time today she was finding herself seeing the past from Mark’s viewpoint, and she wasn’t enjoying it in the least. ‘But I had absolutely no control over the really major incidents—I swear it!’

‘You mean there were other things—apart from the fire?’

‘One or two things,’ muttered Lucy uncomfortably. ‘Well—only two major ones...and as the last only happened a couple of years ago, it shouldn’t have affected Mark in the least—but, needless to say, it did, in a roundabout way, though I only discovered that today.’

She told Sarah about the American she had met through a vague acquaintance and the nightmarish results of her accepting a lunch invitation from him simply out of compassion for his apparent loneliness in a strange city.

‘I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies in that it was only the American Press that got hold of my name,’ finished off Lucy despondently. ‘Though heaven alone knows how they managed to make the connection between me and the Waterfords.’

‘The other disaster you mentioned,’ murmured Sarah, shaking her head in sympathetic disbelief, ‘surely it wasn’t on that scale?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘It depends how you view my writing off Mark’s car—actually, it was by no means written off, though it might just as well have been the way he carried on—and still does to this day...I’m glad someone finds this amusing,’ she exclaimed indignantly, as Sarah became convulsed with laughter.

‘I’m sorry,’ choked Sarah, trying desperately to control herself. ‘Lucy—you did have a driving licence, didn’t you?’ she gasped in sudden sobering horror.

‘I didn’t—I was only sixteen. Though I’d had a few driving lessons in the States,’ replied Lucy. ‘But at the time it seemed like a life and death situation,’ she sighed. ‘It happened during that couple of weeks I had to stay at Mark’s flat. I’d gone down to the garage—one of those massive underground places—to get something I’d left in his car, when I saw Perry, the spaniel belonging to a delightfully daffy old neighbour of Mark’s. Perry was lying beside one of the bays and at first I was convinced he was dead, but he started this awful twitching when I touched him.’

‘Oh, Lucy, how ghastly,’ exclaimed Sarah, not in the least put out to discover this life and death emergency featured a dog rather than a human.

‘It was,’ agreed Lucy. ‘And I was terrified the old dear would come looking for him—she absolutely worshipped him and rarely let him out of her sight. Mark had gone off with one of his women in her car—she was one I particularly loathed,’ she interposed venomously, ‘and I’d no idea when they’d be back. I knew there was a vet not too far away, down a side-street, which meant I wouldn’t touch a main road...you see, I didn’t want to risk carrying Perry there, in case I did further damage—at that point I was sure he’d been hit by one of the cars.’

‘So you decided to take your stepbrother’s car,’ sighed Sarah.

Lucy nodded. ‘I was perfectly aware of how wrong it was,’ she admitted, ‘but it somehow seemed less wrong than letting that little dog die. I managed to get him into the car without heaving him around too much and started it up with no trouble. I had learned how to reverse—but not in a car like Mark’s. I’d also never come across anything like power steering before, so when I yanked the steering-wheel round I used far too much force and smashed the side of the car into one of the concrete pillars. Needless to say, I panicked and did far more damage than an experienced driver would have,’ she added with a sigh.

‘What about Perry?’ demanded Sarah, plainly not in the least concerned about the car.

‘His recovery was nothing short of miraculous,’ she replied wryly. ‘He was suddenly up on his feet and wagging his tail as normal. In fact, it was just then that his owner came looking for him, so I opened a window and he leapt out and bounded over to her as right as rain.’

‘You’re kidding!’ gasped Sarah.

‘It seems Perry was prone to occasional fits,’ sighed Lucy, ‘and it was in the tail-end of one that I found him.’

‘Oh, heck,’ groaned Sarah.

‘Oh, heck, yes,’ agreed Lucy. ‘Because it was just as Perry and his mistress trotted off that Mark and his woman appeared.’

‘And our Lucy, needless to say, offered no word in her own defence.’ Sarah gave an exasperated shake of her head.

‘I didn’t get a chance, the way he started ranting at me,’ protested Lucy. ‘It was bad enough listening to the racket he was making, without having that smirking female witnessing it all!’

‘Poor Lucy,’ sighed Sarah. ‘And with your track record anyway, I can’t say I blame you for not bothering.’ She uncurled her legs and got to her feet. ‘Come on, I’ll make us some tea—you deserve one after relating all that.’

As they pottered around the tiny kitchen, Lucy tried to clear her head of the oppressive gloom now clouding it.

‘Sarah, I’ve decided I’ve really got to get myself organised with my writing,’ she blurted out.

Sarah turned from the tray she was preparing with a look of surprise. ‘I’ve been telling you that for months now,’ she said. ‘Heavens, Lucy, you’ve practically made it already. I thought your problem was money, but it obviously isn’t. If I were you I’d pack in the job—you could go and stay with your mother and stepfather and do your writing in the lap of luxury.’

‘My problem is money,’ replied Lucy in ominously quiet tones. ‘It’s my mother who married into wealth, not me!’

Sarah gave her a startled look. ‘But surely there’s nothing to stop you staying with your own mother while you write?’

‘You mean stay with my mother and sponge off the Waterfords,’ exclaimed Lucy bitterly. ‘One of the reasons I’m so desperate to make a financial success of my writing is that I want to be free of the Waterfords and their damned empire. It’s bad enough being employed by them as some sort of poor relation, but my writing’s one area where I intend succeeding without a penny of their support.’

‘Lucy, I got the impression you were rather fond of your stepfather!’ exclaimed Sarah in shocked tones.

‘I am—I’m very fond of him,’ protested Lucy, picking up the tray and taking it into the living-room. ‘And I’m beginning to wish Mark had never told me about this operation coming up,’ she exclaimed as she placed the tray on the coffee-table. ‘What if I really am jinxed and get involved in something ghastly before he’s recovered?’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Sarah, flashing her a look of exasperation as she began pouring the tea. ‘From that tirade you just delivered in the kitchen, I can only conclude it’s your dishy stepbrother you want all this freedom from,’ she stated, handing Lucy a cup.

‘Why does everyone always have to refer to his looks?’ demanded Lucy despairingly.

‘Because he’s an exceptionally good-looking man,’ retorted Sarah sharply. ‘And I must say, it makes a pleasant change to hear all the women making such openly sexist remarks about a man’s looks, instead of the other way round.’

‘They wouldn’t drool quite so much if they knew what an overbearing tyrant he really is,’ muttered Lucy. ‘One of the reasons I can behave like a moron with such ease is that I spent most of my teenage years listening to him telling me I am one.’

‘Oh, my poor Lucy,’ groaned Sarah. ‘I’d always suspected you had some sort of a hang-up about your lack of qualifications—but I’d have thought the way your writing’s been received would have boosted your confidence no end on that score.’

‘Sarah, they’re only children’s stories—’

‘What do you mean, “only”?’ cut in Sarah incredulously. ‘They’re fantastic! And the kids must have enjoyed them, otherwise the publisher wouldn’t be nagging you for more. I know people with a string of degrees behind them who’d give their right arm to get into print.’

Lucy gave her a sheepish smile. She was secretly enormously proud of her small success—and it had boosted her confidence no end.

‘I take it your stepbrother knows nothing of what you’ve achieved?’ said Sarah, her expression resigned.

‘You’re the only person I’ve told,’ admitted Lucy cagily.

‘You’ve not even told your mother?’

Lucy shook her head, her feelings of discomfiture bordering on guilt as she did so.

‘I want to make sure it’s something I actually can do as a career before I started broadcasting it,’ she said. ‘And I honestly do intend getting myself organised to write more regularly,’ she insisted, brightening visibly with the prospect.

‘You’ll make a most successful career out of it—that’s for sure,’ Sarah informed her confidently. ‘But something tells me that all the success in the world with your writing isn’t going to help cure the problem you have with the divine—in looks, that is—Mark.’