by India Grey
‘What will I do without you to dress me?’
His hands closed around her shoulders and he turned her back to face him. Tilting his head back, he stared down into her face and spoke through gritted teeth.
‘It’s not too late.’
Rachel looked up into the face she loved for its uncompromising strength as much as for its undeniable beauty. For a moment she found herself wondering whether Felix would inherit his father’s unshakable determination as well as his aristocratic features. She would never find out. But though she would never see him grow and change and become himself she still had a responsibility to make that journey as smooth as she could for him. That was why she had to do this.
‘It is,’ she whispered brokenly, and his grip tightened convulsively on her shoulders, as if she’d hurt him and he was tensing himself against the pain. ‘I’m sorry, Orlando, but it is too late.’
There was another urgent knock at the door, and the voice called ‘They’re ready Miss Campion.’
Orlando let her go, holding his hands up as if in surrender for a second, before letting them fall helplessly to his sides. ‘In that case I won’t hold you back any more.’
He stood aside. Rachel was ghostly pale, trembling with the effort of holding herself together. The thought of playing in front of almost two thousand people in just a few short minutes was nothing compared with the emptiness that would come afterwards, when she came back in here and Orlando would be gone. These last few seconds seemed infinitely precious, loaded with a lifetime of meaning and feeling.
She hesitated by the door and looked at him with huge, troubled eyes.
‘I just wish…’ she said, in a voice that was low and filled with pain. ‘I just wish you could have told me why you wouldn’t let me near you, that’s all. Because I want to know it wasn’t something stupid, like the fact that you’re losing your sight. You have to know that that wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference to how I felt about you.’
Very slowly he turned his head towards her. He wore an expression of intense desolation.
‘Arabella told you?’
‘She did. But I found out for myself before that. At Easton.’ Rachel opened the door. ‘And it doesn’t make you any less of a hero or any less of a father or any less of a bastard for breaking my heart. So get over it and stop hiding behind it.’
For a moment after she left he stood as if turned to stone, and then he rushed out into the corridor in her wake.
Too late. She was gone.
A few moments later a gust of air seemed to ripple through the building as it was shaken by a storm of tumultuous applause. But to Rachel, taking her place at the piano in the centre of the starkly lit platform, the applause and adulation of two thousand people was immaterial. She played for herself, and for Orlando and Felix, to express a grief that words could not adequately convey.
It was, quite simply, the performance of a lifetime.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
London. Four months later.
‘SO THIS is the heir of Easton?’
Andrew Parkes leaned over his desk and peered benignly at Felix. ‘Gorgeous little chap, Orlando. Very like you—and his namesake, of course. Very like Felix too.’
Orlando gave a wry smile. There was perhaps good reason for that—as Arabella had maliciously revealed in one of their final arguments, before she’d left for her new home in Dubai with her oil executive fiancé. Orlando was indifferent; all that mattered was that Felix was staying with him. The oil executive didn’t like children, apparently.
‘So…’ Reluctantly, Andrew stopped blowing raspberries at Felix and cleared his throat self-consciously. At six months, Felix was distractingly sweet. ‘How are you?’
Orlando shrugged. ‘No change. My sight hasn’t deteriorated any further. I can still get around fine. I can change the odd nappy, if I have to, though don’t tell the nanny that.’
Andrew Parkes nodded. ‘Excellent.’ Though that didn’t explain why Orlando Winterton still had the look of a man who had just been released from the torturer’s cell. ‘And how are you finding the…er…adjustment, mentally.’
Orlando sighed impatiently. ‘I’m doing all right, Andrew. People know now. I don’t hide it any more.’
Or hide behind it.
‘That’s a huge step forward.’
Orlando stood up, deftly holding Felix against his body with one hand, and the little boy regarded Andrew with clear Winterton eyes while Orlando stared fixedly ahead. ‘It’s one thing coming to terms with it for myself, but I need to know what the chances are that Felix will have inherited this too.’
Andrew looked thoughtful. ‘Slim, I’d say. It’s a very rare disease, and for a child to get it both parents need to be carriers of a recessive gene. We can’t test for the gene yet, but obviously Felix will be very closely monitored.’
Orlando’s face was dark. ‘Would it make any difference if I wasn’t his father but my brother was? Would that make it less likely?’
‘Probably not…’ Andrew replied carefully. ‘I assume you ask that for a reason?’
Orlando gave a wintry smile. ‘My brother was apparently devastated by my diagnosis, and Arabella very generously offered him solace,’ he said sardonically. ‘Naturally it’s all my fault. As is Felix’s death. According to Arabella, he was too upset by the prospective bleakness of my life to be able to fly safely.’
‘Ah…’ Frowning, Andrew rested his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. ‘I think, Orlando, I should mention something at this point that might ease your conscience a little. I can’t say too much, but Felix had also been referred to me, as you were, following a routine sight test. His appointment was the week following yours. He telephoned my secretary to cancel it. He didn’t book an alternative date.’
Blood drummed in Orlando’s ears as the implications of what Andrew was saying hit him. ‘You’re saying that maybe Felix…?’
Andrew held up a hand to stop him. ‘I’m saying nothing, because that would be in direct contravention of the Hippocratic Oath. No, I am merely letting you know of your brother’s change of plans. From that,’ he said emphatically, ‘you may draw your own conclusions, and if they lead you to the realisation that you are in no way to blame for what happened to him that’s only fair. As for this little chap—Felix the second—he’s no more and no less likely to inherit the condition whichever of the two of you were responsible for his arrival in the world.’
‘Thank you, Andrew.’
As Orlando carried Felix carefully down the steps to the street, he thought about what Andrew had just told him. He’d discovered a lot about himself in the last four months. Mostly things that Rachel had seemed to know right from the start. Like the fact that courage wasn’t only measured by medals and military honours, and heroism wasn’t about wearing a uniform and dying in a far-flung place.
What Andrew Parkes had just said only served to reinforce that.
He’d been so quick to assume that Felix was the brave one, that while he had been falling apart at home his brother had been out there protecting his country, upholding the family name. But maybe, just maybe, Felix had been the cowardly one. Faced with the same challenge, Felix had opted for the easy way out. Orlando had chosen to fight.
Though at times it was a bleak and bitter struggle.
Outside, the polluted city air was warm, and the afternoon sun slanted down between the buildings onto the acid-green leaves of the trees outside Andrew’s consulting rooms. Automatically Orlando’s imperfect gaze sought out the place where he’d first seen Rachel’s picture over a year ago, on that dark, hopeless day of his first diagnosis.
At first he thought it was his mind and his sight playing tricks on him—another instance of the brain supplying the image that it wanted to see. He blinked and rubbed a hand across his face, hardly daring to look at it again.
But it was there again. Another picture. Blurred. Only visible to him in tantalisingly small pieces. But the date on the
poster was today’s.
Slumped in front of her dressing room mirror, Rachel squirted the dregs from a bottle of eye-drops into eyes reddened by not enough sleep and too many tears, before making a start on repairing the ravages four months of grief had wrought on the rest of her face.
It was a warm evening in June, but she was wearing her beloved old cashmere sweater to keep at bay the chill which seemed to pervade her bones all the time these days. The tour had been a massive success; every date had been followed by rapturous reviews from critics, who claimed that she ‘imbued the music with hitherto unplumbed emotional depth’, and that she was a ‘courageous performer’.
The latter statement was the only thing that had brought a faint smile to her lips in months. She had paid a high price for that courage. It was a legacy of her time with Orlando.
Another was that Carlos had kept a hostile but merciful distance since the night Orlando had threatened him. Her mother, who had a much less rosy opinion of Carlos since he had tried to replace Rachel with a stand-in, was now much more of an ally, and while Rachel would never forgive Elizabeth for all the years when discipline had replaced love, at least she understood better now. Love was so very, very sore.
Glancing up at the clock, Rachel steeled herself for the knock at the door. Tonight was the last date of the tour, and though she was tired, she was also dreading life beyond the final encore. She was afraid that without this nightly exorcism, the demons inside her would slowly smother her.
The door opened and Elizabeth put her head round it. ‘All set, darling?’ she enquired brightly. Rachel nodded. ‘Take off that dreadful old sweater, then, sweetie, and I’ll see you afterwards.’ Blowing a kiss, she disappeared.
Reluctantly Rachel got to her feet and peeled the sweater over her head, then stood for a moment looking at her reflection in the mirror. She was wearing another dress in her signature dark ivy-green, made of satin this time. Its neckline plunged down to a narrow band of beading beneath the bust, from where the fabric fell with bias-cut fluidity, artfully skimming the new roundness of her belly.
The other lasting reminder of her time with Orlando.
It was a glorious evening.
The sky, which had been an unbroken dome of Wedgwood blue all day, was now dotted with feathery fine tufts of cloud, stained blush-pink by the setting sun so they looked like the marabou trim on a bride’s negligée. After two weeks of torrential rain the unexpected arrival of summer had created an expansive mood amongst the concert crowd on the balcony of the Bankside Hall. They lingered over their cocktails and champagne until the last possible moment, before making their way unhurriedly inside for what promised to be a fine programme of music.
Following the rave reviews, tickets to the concert had sold out with lightning speed, but tonight there were a few unclaimed seats as, swayed by the sudden spell of good weather, people had taken off to the country or to Ascot. Therefore it hadn’t been difficult for Orlando to arrange a last-minute seat at the back of the hall.
What had been more problematic was persuading the girl on the door to let him take Felix in.
In the end she had been powerless to resist the old magic formula of devastatingly good-looking man with small baby and, muttering anxiously about losing her job, had let him slip through the doors when the lights were dimmed. She’d been rewarded with a kiss on the cheek, which more than made up for the worry of being found out.
With Felix fast asleep in his arms, Orlando slumped into his seat and steeled himself, as an eruption of applause told him that Rachel had just walked onto the platform. Tipping his head back against the seat, he could just make out her vivid hair, shining beneath the bright spotlights like flame.
For a second there was silence as the audience settled, and then the opening bars of a Debussy prelude floated through the warm evening air.
An audible breath of collective contentment rose from the audience. Until that moment Orlando hadn’t given a thought to the music, but as the sound filled the rafters and ran in rippling currents over his tautly stretched nerves he was transfixed. It reminded him so poignantly of when Rachel had been at Easton, and all the nights he’d sat at his desk, wrestling with life and death issues on the other side of the world, and she’d reached out to him through the cold blackness and reminded him of his own humanity. The irony was so perfect: he’d been handling a defence crisis, and all the time his own defences had been being stealthily undermined. And he hadn’t even realised until it was too late.
Far too late.
Could there be any words more poignant than those?
Time ceased to exist as he sat there, hovering in a state of blissful painlessness, suspended between having her and not having her. He had grown so used to waking up alone, as yet another dazzling dream of Rachel faded, leaving him with his monochrome and lonely reality, that just breathing the same air as her for a couple of hours was, he realised desolately, better than being without her altogether. And, after so many months of firmly steering his thoughts away from Rachel, it was the greatest relief to just give in.
At length he was aware of the piece coming to an end, and for a moment there was absolute silence in the cavernous hall as everyone sat, still spellbound. Then there was an explosion of clapping.
In his arms Felix gave a start, raising his head and whimpering slightly before settling again. Orlando held his breath. Then below, on the rostrum, Carlos cued the orchestra into a Scarlatti sonata, and Felix, roused a second time, gave a loud, indignant wail.
Carlos made a vicious slashing motion with his baton and whirled imperiously around. Instantly the orchestra ground to a ragged halt.
‘A baby?’ said Carlos in outrage. ‘What is the meaning of this?’
Orlando got abruptly to his feet. Felix was crying in earnest now, the sound drifting up into the roofspace, thin and plaintive. In the audience curious muttering broke out as heads turned and feet shuffled, and then there was a collective gasp as the pianist herself got up and peered out into the crowd.
The murmuring was hushed again as everyone held their breath and waited for her reaction. Straining forward in their comfortable cherry-red seats, they eagerly anticipated a display of diva rage to complement the glowering indignation on Carlos Vincente’s face. But instead they saw a look of naked hope and longing as Rachel Campion shielded her eyes against the bright lights that were directed on her, straining past them to look into the darkness beyond.
‘Felix?’
It was no more than a whisper, but the microphone above the piano picked it up and amplified it so that above the crying of the baby everyone heard the low note of yearning in her voice.
‘Orlando?’
As if operated by a central remote control, every head turned to the back of the hall. The man who stood in the central aisle, holding a crying baby in his arms, was tall, romantically dark and breathtakingly handsome. He also looked as if he had been struck by lightning.
The atmosphere in the hall was suddenly charged with electrifying tension. No one moved, and the only sound was the heart-wrenching cries of the baby.
Rachel sat down at the piano again. Softly, and with infinite tenderness, she began to play.
Chopin’s Nocturne in E Minor rippled from her fingers in a magical, shimmering rainbow of sound, every note vibrating with love and longing. Even though the conductor had now left the rostrum, one by one the members of the orchestra joined in, until the hall was filled with the purest sound.
It was as if angels hovered in the rafters.
In the spotlights Rachel’s tears glistened like falling diamonds. Her face was that of a suffering Madonna—full of pain and adoration and tortured bliss.
The Bankside Hall held one thousand three hundred people. By the time the music melted back into a shivering silence Felix was amongst the few who weren’t crying. For a moment there was an absolute absence of sound. And then the muffled thud of a door shutting at the back of the hall.
When everyone turned to
look, the man with the baby had gone.
And when they turned back so had the pianist.
The network of passages behind the stage at the Bankside was labyrinthine. Rachel’s breath came in desperate gulps as she hurtled along them, alternating between hope and terror as she desperately tried to find her way to him.
He was probably here with Arabella, her head very firmly said. Or else she’d gone somewhere else for the evening and left him at a loose end with Felix…
But he had come, and that was something, her heart cried wildly. He had come, and she couldn’t let him leave without asking to see him again. She knew how much he loved Felix—he had a right to know about his other child. Her baby.
The sound of her heels on the tiled floor echoed madly in the stark corridors as she ran, so she paused to slip them off and carried on, not caring what she looked like to the few straggling musicians and backstage staff she passed. Rounding a corner, she found herself on the mezzanine balcony that rose up from the Bankside’s famous Art Deco entrance hall.
She rushed to the railing and looked down.
With the concert still technically not ended, the place was deserted—except for one man crossing the austere white space towards the door. There was no mistaking those massive shoulders, the narrow hips and long legs, the slow, deliberate walk. Or the infant, now quiet, in the car seat.
’Orlando…Please…Wait!’
His hand was on the door.
‘You can’t just leave like that!’ she said wildly, the pain in her voice echoing around the stark walls.
As if in slow motion she watched his arm fall back to his side. Seeming to tense himself, as if in anticipation of some terrible blow, he turned round. His expression was rigidly controlled, his narrow eyes dark and hollow.
‘I have to.’
She gazed down at him. Her chest was heaving with the exertion of running, and also with painful locked-in emotions. The air seemed to have been squeezed from her lungs and replaced with razorblades, and her eyes searched his face for answers to the questions she hardly dared to ask.