She gave him a nervous smile which quickly faded. “It's stopped raining.”
He nodded.
“I can run you back to your hotel in the car, if you like.”
“I'll walk.”
She pushed an espresso cup across the marble counter. “Ho fatto caffe.”'
“Thanks.”
She hugged herself, shivering in the cool of the morning. “Are you disappointed?”
He was lost for words. I’ve done nothing wrong, he reminded himself. You're not my sister. Neither, for that matter, is Diana, not by blood.
The reason I shouldn’t have done this is because I haven’t told you everything. If you still wanted to sleep with me after you knew the truth - that would be okay. But what is the truth? I still don’t know.
But I should not have done this until I was sure. Silence is as bad as lying; his father had taught him that.
And if I’m right, how will I ever tell you? How can I tell Diana? Would anyone want to know such a thing about themselves and their family? Perhaps it’s better if I catch that flight today and you never hear from me again.
“I've only had one other boyfriend. I went out with him for nearly three years. I'm a good Catholic girl and he was afraid of my father, I think. We only slept together twice.”
“I'm not disappointed.” He sipped his coffee. There were tears in her eyes. “What's the matter?”
“Nothing.” She swallowed hard. “What time is your flight?”
“Midday.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
“Of course. I’ll ring you from London.”
“Okay.” She reached across the counter, touched his fingertips. “Mi dispiace.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I promised myself I would not feel anything about you. I lied to both of us.”
He kissed her, but it was awkward. He turned for the door, shut it gently behind him. He did not look back as he crossed the square, knew she was watching him from the window.
He walked with his head down against the cool wind, across the Ponte Sisto and through the dark streets to his hotel. When he got there he went up to his room, packed his case and called for a taxi. He got to Fumicino just as dawn was breaking over the city and put himself on standby for the eight o'clock BA flight to Heathrow. He was afraid that if he waite dubntil lunchtime he might be tempted to change his mind.
Chapter 66
Market Dene
Berkshire, England
STEPHEN BOUGHT THE house because it had character. There had been a dwelling recorded on the site in the Doomesday Book and parts of the laundry wall dated from the original cottage built in the days of William the Conqueror. The electrics were a nightmare, the plumbing was worse.
It had been extended piecemeal over the centuries, a circumstance attested to by the different types and colours of the brickwork. This oddity was partly disguised by the ivy that had taken hold on three of the four walls. There were grey stone tiles on the roof and gabled windows that looked out over a cobblestone yard, with a byre and a pond on one side, stables and outbuildings on the other. The house had six bedrooms, a library and even a billiards room. It was too large for their needs, and far too expensive to heat in winter but it was an indulgence he could afford.
He was now the general manager of the publishing house that he had worked for in Buenos Aires. He drove into the Oxford headquarters three days a week, the rest of the time he worked at home in his study. But Stephen's wealth did not come from publishing, but from the money left to him by his father, who had amassed a modest fortune on the stock market.
***
Luke parked behind the pink Volkswagen in the driveway; Diana was down from university. He smiled. She was the only tomboy he knew who liked pink.
Mercedes came out of the house. She was still in her dressing gown. Her hair hung in wisps about her face. “Luke!’
“Hello Ma.”
She hugged him. “When did you get back from Rome?”
“Yesterday.”
“You had a good trip?”
“Sure.”
He heard voices inside the house. “Diana’s down for the weekend,” she said. “Are you staying?”
“I have to go back to London tonight. Deadlines.”
“On a Saturday?”
“News never sleeps.”
She took his arm. “Oh, what a shame. Your father will be disappointed. Never mind. Come on, he’s been dying to see you. He’s playing tennis with your sister. It might be a good time to break it up. Your father is losing, by the sounds of it.”
There was a clay tennis court at the rear of the house, surrounded by a green mesh fence. As they came around the corner he saw his father first. He was greyer these days, wiry in his tennis whites, but still very fit even though he was well into his fifties. He had always been a very good tennis player but this morning he was getting a run for his money.
Diana had her back to him, lean and brown in white shorts over a lycra bodysuit. The outsized running shoes she wore reminded him of another young woman jogging in the Trastevere. She stretched across the net to win the point with a crisp backhand drop volley.
Stephen shook his head. “Your set.” Luke could tell it was all he could do to stop himself slamming the spare ball into the net. He was the consummate Englishman until he played tennis and then he turned into John McEnroe.
Gabriella turned around, saw him and waved. “Luke!'
He felt an unpleasant, oily sensation in the pit of his stomach. The world jarred out of balance. It was like seeing a ghost. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck as they had when he first saw Simone in the Casa di Santa Maria.
“Will I ever see you again?”
“Hello, sis.”
How the hell am I going to do this? he asked himself. They all look so happy. How am I going to tell them?
Chapter 67
THEY HAD BREAKFAST on the patio. There was toast and muffins and home-made strawberry jam that Mercedes bought from an old lady in the village. She brought out a pot of Earl Grey tea and some freshly brewed coffee.
A wasp drowned in the strawberry jam while small brown sparrows darted around the stone flags looking for crumbs, bigger starlings hovering at a more discreet distance on the lawn.
Diana buttered some toast. The gold broken heart pendant at her throat flashed in the morning sunlight.
She felt Luke's eyes on her. “What?”
“Nothing. How are things at Cambridge?”
Diana shrugged. “Okay.”
“I saw an old friend of mine in Rome. I told him my sister was studying genetics. He thought it was probably too difficult for a girl.”
She made a face.
“I told him you were smarter than you looked.”
“Well, so are you. But for you it's easy, for me it's a real achievement.”
Stephen put down the newspaper. He had always read the Independent but had switched to the Guardian out of loyalty to his son. “How was Rome?”
“Okay.”
“A junket,” Diana said.
“He's doing a feature on the Vatican,” Mercedes told her.
“Did you talk to the Pope? Did he tell you all his dark secrets?”
“Secrets? There’s three things about Rome. Saint Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel and secrets.” They all looked up at him and waited for him to continue. Instead he jumped to his feet and gathered up the breakfast plates. “I'll wash up,” he said.
Stephen stared after him as he went back inside the house. “Well, that's something new,” he said.
***
The house was quiet. Stephen was working in his study and Mercedes was upstairs, taking her afternoon nap. He wandered onto the patio, found Diana lying face down on a sun chairs. She was wearing white bikinis and the sight of her stopped him in his tracks.
They looked the same, but they were not the same. Simone was elegant, his sister liked jeans and university rugby shirt; Simone wore French p
erfume, Diana wore mascara occasionally and lip gloss under protest on special occasions; Simone’s hair was a tangle, Simone’s was styled on the Via Veneto every Saturday.
But the same eyes, the same face; and perhaps the same parents.
You damned idiot, Luke.
He stood beside her, let his shadow fall over the page of her book.
“What are you reading?”
She showed him the cover.
“Byron? I thought at least Jilly Cooper or Shirley Conran.”
“Byron's a romantic, Luke. You wouldn't understand.”
“I can be romantic. I didn’t think you were.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Raise one eyebrow like that?”
“I don't know. It's a gift.” She returned her attention to her book. “Could you rub some more oil into my back?”
He hesitated. “Yes, your ladyship.” He sat on the edge of the sun chair, picked up the bottle. He poured some of the coconut-scented oil onto his palm and rubbed it gingerly into her shoulders.
“Are you okay, Luke?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I don't know. I just get the feeling something's up.” When he didn't answer her, she said: “There's nothing wrong, is there? You've not got some poor girl pregnant?”
“I'm fine.”
He stood behind her at the shuttered window, looking over the piazza. There was a radio playing somewhere. She was wearing a sheer black dress, cut low at the back. He watched the ripple of her shoulder blades beneath her skin. He traced the curve of her spine with his finger.
“There, that should see you cooked for another hour.”
She twisted her head to look up at him. “You sure you're not in any kind of trouble?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You've just got this look on your face.”
“You sure you want to do genetics? Maybe you should be a shrink, like ma.”
“Something happened in Rome.”
“Nothing happened in Rome,” he said and went inside. He had never been a good liar, it was one of his good points and put him at a hopeless disadvantage in journalism and with his family. His face always gave him away.
***
He had planned to tell his father first, but on the flight from Rome he decided that would not be fair. It would be harder to tell Mercedes, her father had always called her fragile, and that was how she had always seemed. If he didn’t tell them both it risked his father being tempted to keep this news to himself. He would simply transfer his dilemma to someone else, like a virus.
He watched his mother's face twitch in her sleep, her limbs starting occasionally at the spectres that haunted her dreams. She was in the bentwood rocker, by her bedroom window, taking her afternoon nap. She seemed to have spent much of her life asleep, or lying in quietly in dark rooms.
He had seen photographs of her, taken in Buenos Aires, when he was still a small child. He did not recognise the confident, smiling woman on his father's arm. Stephen called it clinical depression, and over the years it had become a fact of life, like the weather. You looked hopefully out of the window in the morning and sometimes the sun would be shining, but others the rain would weep down the windows and you knew it would not be a good day.
There were many days he remembered having to creep around the house because his mother had another of her 'migraines'.
She had been a psychiatrist once, in Argentine. It was hard to reconcile such a story with the sickly and pale woman he knew. His father told him once, in whispers, that she had been abducted during the Dirty War, that he had paid a large ransom to get her back, that everyone considered her fortunate to have survived. But his mother never spoke of it, and these days his father changed the subject if he ever tried to ask questions about it. It became one of those taboos that some families have.
Don’t mention Buenos Aires. You don’t want your mother to have another migraine, do you?
A breeze made the curtains shiver. It was laced with the aroma of the honeysuckle that grew wild along the fence.
He heard the tinny rattle of the Volkswagen coming to life. Diana was on her way into town, to pick up some groceries for the evening meal. He had perhaps half an hour. He put a hand gently on Mercedes’ shoulder, nudging her awake.
“Ma,” he whispered. “Ma.”
Her eyes flickered open. It took a few moments for her to focus, remember where she was.
“Luke. What is it? I something wrong?”
“Come downstairs, ma. There's something I have to tell you and Dad.”
Chapter 68
STEPHEN STARED AT the glossy photograph. His hands shook.
“It was taken in the Piazza Navona, three days ago. Her name's Simone Rivera.”
Mercedes sat on the other side of the kitchen table, thumbing through the rest of the prints. When she had finished she pushed them across the table to her husband. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders as if she were cold.
“Did you know?” Luke said.
He saw the look that passed between them. It told him everything. “We suspected,” Stephen said. “That's all.”
“Did you ... tell this girl anything?” Mercedes asked him.
He shook his head. “I thought I should talk to you first.”
“Thank you.”
A long silence. Mercedes used pushed the photographs further away from her with the tips of her fingers. She looked as if she would make them disappear if she could. He waited for more questions, but neither Stephen or Mercedes seemed inclined to say anything more.
Finally he reached into the brown manila envelope at his elbow. “There's more,” he said.
Stephen sighed. Luke realised he had been holding his breath.
“I met her parents.”
“Her parents?” Mercedes repeated.
“She thinks they're her real parents.”
Stephen cleared his throat. “Her mother’s name was Gabriella Altman. Her father was Reuben. They were murdered by the Argentine authorities in 1975.”
“You knew their names?”
“Does that change anything?”
“You never told Diana this?”
“We told her what we have always told you. She was orphaned, that her parents were victims of the Dirty War. She just doesn’t know the details.”
“What details?”
Another look. Finally Stephen said: “We were there the night the Altmans were taken. They were our neighbours. Somehow Diana was left behind. We found her.”
Mercedes put a hand on his arm. “I suppose we thought that it was better if ... what good would it do? The past is best left where it is. They don't even have a grave.”
“We assumed her sister was dead, too. You never think ...” He reached out and, without thinking, did the same thing as his wife had done, pushed the photographs away. “We never expected this.”
Luke brought out the grainy colour photograph of César Rivera, in green polo shirt and tan slacks, his arms around his wife and daughter, the photograph he had removed from its frame that last night in Simone's apartment.
He slid it across the table to his father. Stephen picked it up, looked at it briefly then slammed it back down on the table with the flat of his hand, pushed it away from him as if it were poison.
“You recognise him?”
“It's him,” Stephen said to his wife. “The man in the café.”
“What man?” Luke asked.
“What do you know about him, Luke?”
“Not a lot. Most of it is just rumour. He’s very wealthy and seriously well connected in Rome and inside the Vatican.” He gave him the dossier Jeremy had printed for him. “Read that, if you like. It’s not pretty reading, but I can’t substantiate any of it. Probably couldn’t publish it, even if I could. The only thing I know for sure is that he was a colonel in the army in Argentine during the Dirty War, and that he
left for Italy soon after Alfonsin's victory in 1983.”
“I met him once,” Stephen said. “In Buenos Aires. He tried to blackmail me.”
“Blackmail you? Why?”
“Because he could and because he probably wasn’t as rich as he is now.”
Angeli’s photograph lay face up on the table. Luke looked at his mother. Her face was a sickly grey and she was trembling. Stephen and Luke both had to help her to her feet. She staggered to the toilet and they heard her being violently ill.
Luke heard the tinny rattle of the Volkswagen outside. Diana was back.
“Not a word,” Stephen said.
Chapter 69
STEPHEN'S STUDY WAS the most untidy room in the whole house. There were three filing cabinets, a copier, two fax machines, a computer, telephones, a corkboard. His desk was a jumble of manuscripts loosely tied with string and rubber bands, Despite the clutter, perhaps because of it, Stephen regarded it as his private bolt-hole. He came here when he needed to think, be alone.
Luke had driven back to London. Diana was in the kitchen, preparing supper. He guessed she knew something was wrong. Perhaps she thought he and Luke had had a row. Mercedes' sudden indisposition would have to make do as an excuse for now.
Stephen sat stared out of the lattice window. The sun was low in the afternoon sky, thre was birdsong in the garden. But the sounds replaying in his memory were much less pleasant; the crash of boots on the stairs, a woman's screams, a car roaring away in the night.
He thought that was all done with, had hoped they could forget about it, best they could. But the past was never over, was it? The question now was what they should do about it.
“We have to talk.”
He looked up, startled. He had not heard Mercedes coming up the stairs. She stood in the doorway, twisting her wedding ring around on her finger. She had never been still since her ordeal in Buenos Aires, was like a sparrow, always on the move, throttling a handkerchief or touching her face as if searching for some imaginary wound. Her nails had been beautiful once. For years now they had been bitten down to the quick.
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