by Natalie Fox
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘WHAT are you doing in here?’ Gemma asked, her heart thudding nervously. Why should Bianca make her nervous? Why did the sun rising every morning make her nervous? She was a bundle of ragged nerves and had been since the day she realised she still desired Felipe. She still wasn’t sure how she’d got through the days; they had just merged into a foggy bank of work and avoiding him once again. But distancing herself from the whole family had seemed to work. No one had bothered her till now!
‘I came to see how my uncle’s portrait was progressing. He seems so impressed with it, I thought I’d come and see what all the silly fuss was about.’ She wrinkled her nose at the canvas. ‘Of course, I know nothing about art and wouldn’t know if it was good or bad.’
‘I’d leave it to the experts, then,’ Gemma murmured under her breath, moving across the studio to get her brushes together for Agustªn’s session. He was due any minute.
‘He looks almost human,’ Bianca uttered.
‘He is human,’ Gemma told her, lining up her oils.
‘I suppose you think you know him just because you’re involved with him so intimately. You’re wrong. No one will ever fathom Agustªn out; he’s a loner and always will be.’
‘Perhaps he’s just lonely,’ Gemma suggested, and she thought she was probably right.
Bianca shrugged her golden shoulders. She was dressed in expensive shorts and top in a cinnamon fabric with threads of gold running through it. She made Gemma feel very shabby in the old shirt she worked in.
‘That’s his choice. He could have the world if he wanted it but he chooses to hide himself away here. When Felipe and I are married we’ll leave. I want to settle in New York where there’s life.’
She lay emphasis on her mention of marrying Felipe and Gemma steeled herself, sensing more was coming.
‘Well, aren’t you going to ask what Felipe thinks of that?’ Her saucer-like eyes were wide and innocent but Gemma read malice there none the less.
‘I’m not interested where you spend your married life,’ she was able to say with conviction.
Those eyes narrowed momentarily. ‘So, you’re not in love with him after all?’ Bianca sounded disappointed, had probably anticipated a bit of Gemmabaiting to while away some time. ‘Just after his money, were you?’
‘I have enough of my own,’ Gemma told her baldly.
Bianca laughed shrilly, thinking that a great joke. ‘A woman can never have enough of her own.’
Gemma stared at her. Could it be that Bianca was marrying Felipe for his money? Her curiosity outweighed all else.
‘Are you in love with him?’ Gemma asked openly.
Bianca let out another brittle laugh. ‘I’m going to marry him, aren’t I?’
It was all the answer Gemma needed. ‘From what I gather, love is an option in this forthcoming marriage; take it or leave it,’ she said.
‘Love isn’t important. Felipe and I will make a good marriage.’
‘Of course—Agustªn decrees it.’
‘Agustªn knows best!’ Bianca burst out in a flash of temper. ‘He’s arranged a good marriage.’
‘A profitable one too, for you.’
‘It’s the way things are in our circles,’ Bianca snapped then suddenly she laughed. ‘You’re an outsider and had no chance with Felipe from the start, though I did panic when I found you shacked up with him. A phone call to Agustªn to get him to summon us both to New York soon put paid to that, didn’t it?’
Somehow Gemma wasn’t surprised by that revelation. The whole family smacked of deviousness. So Bianca was capable of manipulating Agustªn, was she? Clever girl. Gemma had got the impression from Agustªn that it had been his idea to get them to New York to sign those papers. She was surprised by the revelation that Bianca didn’t love Felipe, though. The looks she’d misinterpreted as looks of love were nothing more than panic at the thought of losing her rich fiancé.
‘You’d better go now,’ Gemma suggested. ‘Agustªn is due for another sitting.’
‘I’m off. I’ve better things to do than waste time in this dreary place. You’ll be going soon, won’t you? Felipe will be pleased. He can’t stand the sight of you any more. That’s the power his father has over him.’ She strolled out of the studio and Gemma stared after her, realising for the first time that Bianca was actually her cousin. A relative she could happily live without.
So Felipe couldn’t stand the sight of her, Gemma reflected. Well, it was probably true, but the thought was cold comfort.
Gemma walked in the open double doors of the study. They’d been open a lot since she’d started the portrait. Agustªn used the walkway every time he came for his sitting now and Gemma supposed that that was the way he had planned it: him working in the study, her mother across at the studio, close yet able to follow their own occupations. So what had kept these two people apart, two people who had loved each other? Gemma was sure Agustªn had truly loved her mother…But it wasn’t Agustªn she had come to see; he was taking time out to tend his orchids and Felipe was working in the study.
‘Agustªn said to ask you for some photos of an oil rig.’ Her voice was controlled and level but she’d had to work at it. She’d scarcely seen him since he’d ripped the towel from her to reveal all her failings. She would probably need some sort of counselling when she got back to England. She wasn’t real, she lived in fantasy land, as Felipe had once said. She still loved him and that was unreal and a form of madness, surely?
Felipe looked up at her from the computer and frowned. ‘What on earth for?’
‘Background. He insists on an oil rig in the background of the portrait and, as I’ve never seen one in my life before, apart from on the television, I thought I’d better swot up.’
Felipe shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose he told you where I might find them?’
‘The safe,’ Gemma told him. How near normal they were.
‘Here, there’s a wodge of them. You’ll have to sort them out.’ Felipe straightened up from the safe, a monstrously old-fashioned free-standing model that looked like a safe-cracker’s dream. He handed her the package and their fingers glanced off each other and the room was filled with a frisson of heat and awareness.
He smiled thinly. ‘We can’t escape from it, can we?’ Gemma looked up at him painfully. Just one tiny contact and the flame ignited and they were trapped in a ring of fire. She denied it, though.
‘I don’t know what you mean——’
‘You do. I don’t know why you persist in denying it. I thought the night we spent together——’
‘Shut up!’ Gemma cried, so explosively that she shocked herself. ‘If you read anything into that night, forget it…’ She couldn’t bear to be reminded of it, their lovemaking, so perfect, so sensual, so erotic…She closed her eyes and shook her head to free herself. ‘It was nothing, Felipe, it meant nothing——’
Suddenly he was in front of her, gripping her arms. Terrified, she blinked open her eyes.
‘It was damn near everything!’ he bit out. ‘We didn’t give each other our all for bloody nothing!’
‘Who the hell are you kidding?’ Gemma stormed back. ‘Don’t try and make something out of our weakness. You used me, Felipe, then you threw Bianca in my face, just as you did in London!’
‘It was Bianca’s idea to bring forward her trip. When you arrived here I couldn’t bear the thought of her coming at all and tried to get Agustªn to get rid of her but he wouldn’t. She’s family, after all. Agustªn arranged to bring her from Caracas and that was nothing to do with me. I don’t want Bianca; I never have. I meant it when I said you were my life.’
Helplessly she stared up at him. So that was who he was referring to on the phone to Agustªn. She could almost believe him. Dear God, she did believe him…but no…
‘It’s all changed,’ she uttered weakly, lowering her eyes. ‘It’s all over. I keep telling you that but you won’t accept it.’
He held her for a full minu
te. Neither spoke but Gemma guessed his mind must be racing as wildly as hers. Finally she had got it through to him that their affair was over. Honourably? At least she still held her terrible secret and she hadn’t hurt him with the truth of it. She alone would take that misery to the grave with her.
He let her go at last and sat down at his computer. ‘Let me have the pictures back when you’ve done with them,’ he said coldly, dismissively.
Gemma left him and walked slowly back to the studio, the wodge of photos clutched to her chest, a numbness creeping into her bones and her mind. She should feel elated. It was over. She was free. Free but for the guilt and shame that would be with her forever.
She poured herself some fruit juice and sat down on a couch to go through the photos. There were a lot, most extremely boring unless you were in the oil know-how. She studied them intently none the less; anything to take her mind away from Felipe.
Some of the photos were pretty old, sepia-tinted pictures of men and women who were probably family. She managed a smile. With all his money you would think Agustªn de Navas could afford a decent album to mount them in. Gemma put some aside that were worth considering—and then her face paled.
Slowly she got to her feet and padded across the room to the window where there was more light. The picture was of her mother. The young, happy, beautiful Isobel Villiers. She was laughing and so obviously in love that Gemma covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers to suppress a small moan.
‘What have you there?’
Gemma swung round, fumbled to get the picture behind her back.
‘Let me have it, Gemma,’ Agustªn insisted softly.
With trembling fingers she handed it to him. He took it and stared at it painfully.
It was a long time before he spoke. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘It…it was in the pile of photos Felipe took from the safe.’
Agustªn took one last look at the picture before ripping it in half. A cry of protest came to Gemma’s shocked lips and Agustªn’s eyes darkened.
Gemma stared at him fearfully. ‘Why…why did you do that?’ Her cry of protest had been enough to rouse his suspicions without the question to follow it. Gemma tried to cover herself. ‘That…that was the woman you built this studio for, wasn’t it? The woman you loved?’ Days ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of being so open with him.
‘I should have known better,’ he said, almost to himself. He took up his position on the hard-backed chair and Gemma noted he still had the fragments of her mother’s picture in his hand.
Gemma took up her palette, dismayed to find her fingers shaking. Agustªn’s tearing the picture had shocked her. He had done it with bitterness and she longed to know why. Dared she just ask? Confident in their new ease and friendship she did.
‘I’d like to hear about her,’ she ventured, willing the trembling of her fingers away so she could work.
Agustªn smiled. ‘You women, you love to gossip. Do you really want to hear the story?’
Gemma nodded—it was all she could do. Words lay inert in her throat.
‘I met her in England, loved her, thought she loved me…
She did and she still does, Gemma said to herself.
‘I was summoned back to my country and expected her to wait for me, but she didn’t. She married, had a child, a beautiful daughter.’
Gemma’s fingers tightened round her brush and her heart thudded so loudly she thought he must hear it too. How did he know that her mother had married and borne a daughter?
‘You went back for her?’ If he had, it had been too late, just as Felipe’s phone call after a week had been too late.
‘Not for a long while,’ Agustªn went on. ‘When I arrived back in Venezuela it was to find my father dying, with a company crisis on his hands. During my absence in Europe he had found a wife for me, a wife whose family could bail De Navas Oil out of trouble. Because he was so ill, I agreed, hoping that I could sort out the problems before he died and before we lost the company and then I wouldn’t have to marry her.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Time was running out, weeks ran into months as I frantically fought for control of the company and all the time the woman I loved was waiting for my return. During one of my father’s respite periods I flew back to England. Isobel had gone. I hired detectives to find her.’
‘Did they?’ Gemma husked, fighting back tears for her mother. She had a good idea what was coming and her heart ached for the pain of it all.
‘Yes, she was found,’ Agustªn stated briskly. ‘Married. She had wasted little time in finding a new lover and bearing his child. I was incensed, yet still I drove down to Surrey to the address I had been given. I found her, playing with her beautiful daughter in the garden of her home, looking radiant as only you English women can. I watched them from my car but made no attempt to speak with her. I knew then that it would never have worked for us. Her love hadn’t been strong enough to wait for me.’
‘Perhaps you should have written or phoned and told her what was happening when you first got back to Venezuela,’ Gemma suggested. Her mother would have waited if she had known the hardship he had been going through, just as she, Gemma, would have waited for Felipe if only he had called her sooner from New York, but in her and Felipe’s case thank God he hadn’t made such a call.
‘I wrote…’ Gemma jerked up her head at that ‘…but heard nothing. At the time I thought nothing of it. Our love was strong enough…’
‘She might not have got the letter,’ Gemma blurted, sure that her mother never had. If she had she would have written back, she would have waited for him. She had loved him. God, was it possible that they had been deprived of love and happiness through a lost letter? That only happened in books and films, surely?
Agustªn’s broad shoulders heaved in a dismissive shrug. ‘It made no difference. I saw the truth then. It was as I told you before…’
He paused and so did Gemma, her brush suspended in mid-air. ‘What?’ she murmured.
‘It’s best to stick to your own kind. Isobel and I were from different cultures. A South American woman would have waited till the end of time for the man she truly loved. Isobel’s love wasn’t deep enough. She found love again too soon.’
Isobel was pregnant, Gemma wanted to cry, carrying your child! Twenty-six years ago life was so very different…twenty-six years ago…A sudden thought nagged at the periphery of her mind. It persisted till Gemma felt slightly sick and dizzy. But not now, she couldn’t work it out now…
‘You married the woman your father wanted for you?’ Gemma urged on softly. She had to know it all now.
‘There was nothing else left for me to do. I had lost all the fight in me. I gave my father what he wanted: peace of mind to take with him to his grave.’
‘But this studio. Why did you build it if you knew you were going to marry another woman?’
Agustªn smiled. ‘What an inquisitive mind you have. If I told you you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
‘You will not laugh?’
‘Is it funny?’
‘You might think so. You might think the whole romantic notion a trifle incredible coming from a hardened old bastard like me.’
Gemma grinned. ‘Go on, let me be the judge of whether it’s funny or not.’ How could anything in her life ever be amusing again? The story he had told her had been heartrending, a tragedy that never should have happened. But it had, and the repercussions Agustªn would never know.
‘After a week with Isobel I knew I loved her. One week and I knew I wanted her in my life for ever. Don’t you find that amusing?’
Gemma shook her head, her eyes stinging with tears, fuzzing the portrait before her. One week. She swallowed hard. Funny? It was ironically heartbreaking!
‘I arranged the construction of this studio after knowing her for only one week. It was to be a surprise for her. She was an artist, like you, and I wanted it to be a wedding present for her. I never told her, never got round to p
roposing; we were too in love to talk of the future.’
Gemma turned away to the sink on the pretence of oiling her brushes. Tears burned down her cheek and she flicked them away with the back of her hand. She heard him move behind her and she drew herself up, fought the sadness inside her that was tearing her apart.
She swung to face him and he smiled down at her, tilting her chin. ‘So you did find my confessions amusing?’
He had mistaken the mist of sadness in her eyes for laughter. She shook her head. ‘No, Agustªn, not funny but sad. I understand, you see. A week was all Felipe and I had.’
‘And you were misled into thinking it was the real thing——’
‘No!’ Gemma protested, ready to argue that it had been time enough.
‘Yes, dear Gemma,’ he insisted. ‘Real love lasts. My love went on and I suffered for it. I love my son, we argue, we fight, it’s sometimes a sign of a deep love, but I don’t want him to suffer as I did. My love was betrayed by Isobel and though I’m not saying you did likewise to Felipe you must understand that European women are not the same as our own. Felipe will be happy and safer with one of his own kind.’
‘You weren’t happy with your own kind,’ Gemma quietly retaliated.
‘I made the best of it. It was better than the dishonour of having a fickle wife such as Isobel would have turned out to be.’
That hurt. Her mother had not been fickle. She had done what she thought was best at the time, married a good man to give the illegitimate child she was carrying a future. There it was again, that nagging thought that wouldn’t go away…
‘The session is over, I think,’ Agustªn said with a smile. To her surprise he bent and lightly kissed her forehead. ‘I will miss you when you leave, dear Gemma. I have greatly enjoyed our sessions.’