‘Don’t turn away,’ he said. ‘I’m not here to cause you any trouble.’
‘How did you get in?’ she stuttered. In answer he waved a set of keys at her. Mark; they must be his. What was Mark doing giving Nicos the keys to his flat and how did he know she was staying there?
‘Your brother guessed you might be here so he rang his cleaning lady. She told him.’
Melanie took on board the word ‘brother’. But he had said it without a trace of the bitter irony he once would have employed.
‘He has told me a lot,’ said Nicos. ‘It’s clear to me now that you have been his main support. Your loyalty does you credit. But it has to stop. I have told him he can’t leach on you any more. From now on he will come to me. I will assist him. I will give him a job but he will have to prove himself. If he does not he will be out. But we have had a long talk and I think he is going to be all right.’
Melanie was stunned. ‘That’s very generous of you,’ she stuttered. It was so unexpected that for a moment she was lost for words. Finally she managed, ‘Thank you for coming to tell me. I hope Mark will repay your faith.’ She couldn’t help asking, ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I believe I wronged you,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect forgiveness. You should have been able to tell me but it must have been something in me that made you unable to tell me the truth. Therefore the fault is mine.’ She shook her head in denial but he went on. ‘I am not asking you to come back to me but I will make amends.’
I am prepared to give you joint custody of our daughter and adequate funding so you may take care of her in an appropriate manner. ’His tone was formal as if he had rehearsed the speech. Melanie could hardly believe what she was hearing. She tried to stem the flow of joy she felt. Her hopes had been dashed too many times.
‘Will you agree?’ he said. No longer formal, his voice almost breaking, he said, ‘Electra misses you. She is fretful and crying a lot.’
Melanie’s heart nearly stopped. Her daughter needed her. ‘Will you take me to her,’ she stuttered. ‘Would you come back to the island with me then?’ he said wonderingly. ‘Now; tonight.’
‘Of course, I will. What else would I do?’ She flung her clothes into her suitcase in an agony of impatience, her daughter uppermost in her mind. She didn’t know what had gone on between Nicos and Mark but whatever Mark had told him was leading her back to Electra. Tonight that was all she cared about.
The Bentley was at the kerb, the private plane waiting at the airport, the journey was as smooth as all journeys to do with Nicos were. Melanie blessed the speed and ease of it all. It hurried her back to her daughter. They didn’t talk. It seemed Nicos had said all he had come to say.
Electra’s face broke into a beaming smile the minute she saw Melanie, who flew to her and picked her up in her arms smothering her with kisses. ‘You’re mummy’s never, ever going to leave you again, even if I have to tie myself to railings,’ she promised laughing with pure joy.
The next morning there was a visitor to the island. Formally attired he sat behind Nicos’s desk. Melanie had been invited, not summoned this time, to a meeting with him at Nicos’s request. He was not present.
The visitor introduced himself to Melanie as Mr Chalambrous’s lawyer for family affairs. He held a sheaf of papers out to her and said, ‘You will find joint custody arrangements for your daughter here and financial arrangements to be made for you both. I must stress that this documents has been prepared in some haste as Mr Chalambrous was keen to get it finalised. But I must advise you to check it with your own lawyer.’
‘No.’ said Melanie. ‘I trust Mr Chalambrous to be fair. As long as I have my daughter that is all I care about. Just show me where to sign.’
‘You will see from the documents that Mr Chalambrous has stated that you are to have full custody and care of your daughter. I think you will find that the financial arrangements are more than adequate.’ Melanie did her best to read through the documents, but the lines were blurring with her unshed tears. She made out the words ‘full care and custody of Electra Sophia Stafford Chalambrous’ and could read no further. She wrote her name quickly where the lawyer indicated and the tears that started to flow smudged her signature.
She knew she and Nicos would have to meet soon. A million things needed to be discussed between them about Electra’s care. But for the present all she wanted to do was spend time with her daughter and revel in the future with her.
She learned from Anna that Nicos had left the island but would be back in a week. She was glad of the breathing space. She was at a loss what to say to him. He had told her that he didn’t expect her to come back to him. He had said he blamed himself. But now she began to question that. Here was the man who told her he couldn’t change, who had never even tried to listen to her attempted explanations and was now insisting the fault lay with him. His distress that Electra was pining for her mother was genuine enough. Was he shouldering the blame in their past in order to get her to return to the island? He’d said he didn’t expect her to come back to him. Was it simply his way of saying that he needed her as the mother to his child, but not as his wife?
Her thoughts circled ceaselessly. ‘I don’t expect you to come back to me,’ echoed round and round in her head. Did he mean ‘I don’t want you to come back to me?’ But perhaps he really did feel guilty. Mark must have told him at least something, but knowing her brother she suspected it would have been a sanitized version of his chequered past. Had it been enough to change Nicos’s mind about her?
The more she thought about it the more she came to believe that whatever Mark had told him about their shared past Nicos deserved to hear it from her own lips. He had refused to listen to her when she had tried to tell him about Mark. But she had kept a secret from him and when he discovered it she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame him for the action he took. If Nicos was to blame, then so was she. ‘Perhaps we were both guilty.’ she fretted. ‘He deserved more from me. Regardless of what he has learned from Mark I will tell him everything, in my own words,’ she resolved. ‘I won’t spare myself.’
He was back without warning. She had been at the other side of the island with Electra when the motor launch had brought him from the mainland and she hadn’t heart his arrival. Now it was evening and looking out of her window she saw him below on the terrace. She steeled herself for the encounter. Puling herself together she went downstairs.
He was no longer on the terrace. She looked about her uncertainly. Where would he have gone? He must be somewhere in the villa's grounds. She set off to look for him.
He had told her once that when he had a lot of thinking to do he liked to go where the hillside cascaded down to the sea and he had built a vine-covered gazebo. He called it his ‘contemplation suite’. All his staff knew that when he was there nothing and nobody was to disturb him. He was there now. He looked up surprised at her approach and frowned. Melanie wanted to turn and run but stuck to her guns.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said with a determination she didn’t feel.
‘My lawyer told me you signed the custody agreement. He is fining tuning the details of access and when they are complete we can talk,’ he said shortly.
‘This is not about Electra,’ she said, ‘it’s about us.’
‘I expect nothing from you. You need not think I will try to come back into your life.’
His words seared at her heart but she continued. ‘This is not about the future. It’s about the past.’
She couldn’t read his expression but she ploughed on. ‘I don’t know what Mark has told you but I think you need to hear it from me.’
His sigh was audible. ‘Mark told me he had a fight with a man and knocked him down some stone steps. The man ended up in a coma. Mark panicked and when he was arrested denied he’d been there and asked you to give him an alibi.’
‘Yes, that’s all true,’ Melanie whispered. She had been unfair to Mark. It seemed he had been honest. 'But you must unde
rstand I couldn’t let him down?’
‘Even though it cost you your liberty and us our relationship.’ Melanie recoiled at the bleakness in his tone but determination drove her on.
‘The man he attacked came out of his coma, identified Mark as his assailant and that’s when my life started to unravel.’ Her voice shook at the memory.
‘Mark was sent to jail and I was charged with perjury. But you and I hadn’t even met when all of this happened.’
‘But when we did meet you kept the whole thing a secret from me. You deceived me.’
‘Yes, I can’t deny I did,’ said Melanie. She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I was so caught up in the happiness of being with you that I didn’t want anything to spoil it. ‘
‘If only you had told me about it I would have helped you. You just didn’t trust me enough.’
Melanie shrank from the truth of his words. She hadn’t trusted him. Why?
‘I wish I had told you right at the beginning. But the longer it went on the harder it became. Once I tried to tell you, but you stopped me or we were interrupted, I can’t remember which. I know now I should have tried harder to make you listen. But in my innermost heart I wasn’t sure you would understand.
‘I lied for Mark in court, but I didn’t realise the seriousness of what I was doing. I’ve always had to help him out of one scrape or another. He promised me that he didn’t intend to cause the man serious injury. It was just a silly drunken tussle. I believed him. Mark’s not bad, he’s just irresponsible.’
Nicos looked thoughtful. ‘I would have advised you very differently,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure even my best lawyers could have changed the outcome for you.’
‘I know that now,’ she said. ‘But I was foolish enough, to think I could keep it from you. You were away so frequently. The case against me took ages to come to court. I always made sure I telephoned my lawyers or they contacted me when you were not there. By the time my case came up I was nine months pregnant. The barrister told me I could expect a prison sentence but I thought he was just trying to frighten me.’ Her voice was shaking so much now she could hardly continue. ‘I thought I could pay a fine and you would never find out.’
Nicos looked defeated. ‘But I did, didn’t I?’ he said. His own thoughts whirled back to the day when he returned home early from a business trip abroad eager to see the woman who was carrying his child that he had fallen so deeply in love with. She was not at the door to greet him as she nearly always was.
‘Ms Melanie has business in London today,’ the manservant explained. ‘She stayed overnight as I understand her meeting was early.’ He had been puzzled and alarmed. Was there something wrong with the baby? He had rushed to pick up a ringing telephone. A secretary at a firm of solicitor’s announced herself asking to speak to Melanie. He had identified himself and the woman had given him the message to remind Miss Stafford that she was to meet her barrister at the court at 10 am.
As his memories clouded his mind Nicos had fallen silent. Melanie looked fearfully at his set face. ‘How did you find out?’ she asked haltingly.
‘I was there,’ he said. ‘In the public gallery. I saw you sentenced. I heard his name – Mark Fulford. How could I know he was your brother?’
‘Mark will have already old you he’s my stepbrother. My father married again after my mother died. My stepmother already had Mark. He was only two. My father brought him up and treated him as his own son and to me he has always been my baby brother, All my life I looked after him and when my father was dying I promised him I would always be there for Mark. ‘
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me you had a brother?’
‘I didn’t want to tell you he was in jail,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to shame him; or myself to be honest. Mark isn’t bad; he just gets himself into trouble. I didn’t want you to think badly of him.’
‘When I saw you in the dock I nearly lost my reason. I thought you were the woman for me and suddenly you were someone I didn’t know.’
He didn’t tell Melanie of the jealous rage that engulfed him, the steely determination that no woman would deceive him again, least of all this one. The trust he had invested in her imploded and left a red mist in its wake.
Misery flooded Melanie. ‘I’ve ruined our lives, haven’t I?’ she said. He didn’t reply.
She left him then, trailing head down back to the villa swamped in her memories. She would have to spend the rest of her life without the man she loved. For she knew now that she did love him, with all her heart and soul. Her consolation was her daughter. If she didn’t have Electra her life would truly not be worth living. He gave her back to me, she marvelled. In spite of everything, in spite of the way I deceived him, he gave her back to me. Count your blessings, she told herself. Don’t grieve for what might have been
It was halfway through the next morning that Anna came to her while she was by the pool with Electra. ‘My Nicos not happy,’ she said without preamble. Melanie stared at her nonplussed. How much did Anna know? ‘He not happy because he love you.’
‘No, Anna, you’re wrong,’ said Melanie gently. ‘I did him a great wrong.’
‘He love you. I know my Nicos when he little boy. I know when he unhappy. I know he love you.’ She seemed to search for words. ‘He like mule,’ she said eventually.
‘Stubborn, you mean,’ said a bemused Melanie.
‘Yes, like mule. Need good kick. You make him see he got to stay with you.’ With that she peered intently at Melanie as if to reinforce her message and turning hobbled back into the house. Melanie stared after her. ‘Well, what you make of that?’ she asked Electra, who was much too busy with a toy rabbit to listen.
Maybe I am giving up on him to easily, mused Melanie. I tried making him fall in love with me once this summer and it didn’t work. I seem to remember we ended up having a huge row. But he didn’t know the truth then her inner voice reasoned. Now he does you can start with a clean slate.
‘I won you, my darling daughter,’ she told her baby. ‘Now let’s see if I can win your daddy back.’
She began to plan her campaign. By early evening she had showered, buffed and polished her body, glossed her tawny hair till it shone, painted her manicured nails a delicate pink and sprayed herself with a light touch of scent. She pulled on a wisp of lace underwear, shrugged into a close fitting low cut emerald sheath and slipped gold sands on her feet. A touch of matching shadow to bring out the green of her eyes, a hint of coral lipstick and she was ready. Surveying herself in the full-length mirror of her bedroom she told herself, ‘These are your weapons. Get out there and use them.’
There was a moment sitting on the terrace when her courage failed her and she wanted to rush back upstairs, tear off the dress and scrub her face clean. Only the memory of Anna’s insistent words stopped her. Anna had said he loved her. She would find out tonight.
She chose a double carved iron seat facing the doors to the terrace and arranged herself half turned away with her legs crossed and one arm nonchalantly draped along the back of the seat.
‘So you’re doing the honor of dining with me tonight?’ The voice came from behind her. She spun round, her pose forgotten. He had approached from the garden entrance, not from the house. ‘You look startled. Who were you expecting?’
Once she would have bridled, thinking he was accusing her of meeting another man. But he had spoken without rancor. No secrets from him now. She felt a wonderful release. She saw him looking at her with undisguised admiration. ‘You look stunning,’ he said.
‘Good enough to eat with?’ she asked mischievously. This was the tenor she had told herself she would set for the evening, light hearted and flirtatious. ‘Most definitely,’ he replied, matching her tone. The evening was turning out to be everything she hoped. Ice-cold aperitifs followed by a delicious dinner and all the time the bantering between them bordering on the sexual. It was everything she had planned,
Dinner over he took her arm and said, ‘Let’s wa
lk in the garden.’ ‘Perfect’ she told herself. ‘This is working.’
Once in the garden he was silent and seemed lost in thought. She realised he was leading her down to the gazebo. The memory of their last meeting there changed her mood. She wished they were somewhere else, anywhere but there. He, too, seemed effected by it and his tone was sombre when he said, ‘We were good together, weren’t we?
His next words turned her to stone. ‘But it’s over. I can’t change what happened. I would if I could, but it’s not to be.’ He looked infinitely sad.
From somewhere Melanie found courage. This was the man she loved. She was going to fight for him.
‘Listen to me,’ she said urgently. ‘You once told me you wanted a woman who was loyal and true. One who would stand by you no matter what and at what cost. I am such a woman. I have proved it to you. I made a vow and I kept it and you know what it cost.
‘Are you going to throw away everything we had because the promise I kept wasn’t made to you. It is the promise that is important and whether it is kept – not who it’s made to. You say it’s over for you but think about what you are throwing away. Think about the life we could have together.’
Nicos looked at her with disbelief. ‘Are you telling me you still want to be with me?’
‘What else do you think I’m trying to say,' she said brokenly.
He put his hands on her shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. She wanted to wipe the tears away but he held her too tightly, his arms gripping her. He looked at her for a long time, searchingly as if he was trying to see into her very soul. Finally he relaxed his grip and said, ‘Come. Sit down.’
He put his arm around her and led her to the bench. She sank down, exhausted by her outburst. She had done her best. She didn’t know how else to reach him.
He began to talk. ‘When you ran away to London and I discovered the truth from Mark I believed you would never want anything to do with me again. I blamed myself and I still do. You didn’t tell me the truth but what was it in me that made you afraid to. I looked deep inside myself and found myself wanting. You should have been able to confide in me.
The Passionate Greek Page 16