‘To be told you could make it into a civic orchestra – that is a disaster?’
Tara turned her head to examine his expression. As she might have foreseen it gave nothing away. ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
He nodded – said nothing.
‘Would you have been pleased at nineteen to have been told you might make it to the rear section of the violins in a second-rate orchestra – if you practised?’
‘I was never a violinist.’
‘Hah! Sliding out of the question.’ She turned to stare out of the window. She felt wretched and bleak. The master class had not only unnerved her but had dug deep into the rawness of her grief. It was as though her father had been there with her during those fateful minutes and she had been powerless to prevent herself letting him down.
‘What were you hoping for? To be told you had a future as a soloist?’ Xavier asked.
‘Probably.’ She felt a fresh stab of pain as the flame of ambitious optimism that had glowed throughout the years of her childhood was finally snuffed out. ‘Yes, I used to hope for that. That is what he wanted for me.’
‘And were his hopes realistic?’
‘You’ve just heard me play. You should know,’ she responded aggressively.
‘I did not hear you as a child. A great deal could have happened since then.’
Tara did not reply. She did not want to talk about it; her childhood potential, the anxiety to match up to her father’s hopes. She wanted to cry again because she had lost him forever. She wondered how long it would be before she stopped feeling like this.
They were out of the city now, on the carriageway leading to the west-bound motorway. She glanced at Xavier. ‘Why aren’t we going straight home?’
‘I enjoy driving. And you’re not busy are you?’
She shrugged. She glanced at the rev counter. The rpms were up at 400. The car was doing ninety and still accelerating.
Her eyes moved to Xavier’s profile, travelled over the lithe supple body and the slender powerful hands placed at ten past ten on the small steering wheel. She found that she could not keep her eyes off him. Against her will she was fascinated. There was something unfathomable in those steely cold eyes with their deeply cowled lids. And his face was disturbingly arresting, troubling even. The long carved bones were those of a medieval knight, the deep forehead reminiscent of the stone heroes who lay on marble-topped coffins in great cathedrals.
Something stirred and uncoiled in her body, something dark and primitive, giving her an uneasy premonition of some basic and fateful change about to overtake her. Briefly he turned to her, his lips curved into a smile as though he were relishing a private joke. She did not smile back.
They were on the motorway, in the outside lane. Behind them the trail of cars was rapidly swallowed up in the disappearing distance.
‘It’s illegal,’ Tara breathed, exhilarated and a little fearful.
‘I know all the radar traps. And no police car could catch us if we really started moving.’
Tara moulded herself into the back of her seat and watched the countryside spin past.
‘I love speed,’ he told her. ‘In the summer I judge the quality of my driving by the number of flies I kill with the side windows.’
Tara felt a lurch of nausea. The speedometer now registered one hundred and thirty.
‘Are you afraid?’ he enquired softly.
She moistened her lips and looked again into his face. ‘No. Was that what you wanted?’
He laughed. ‘I’m glad you trust me.’
Tara’s fingers were laced together, her knuckles white. ‘I trust you because you’re the sort of man who values himself very highly. You believe your life is important,’ she said steadily. ‘You would never put yourself at real risk.’
His lips curled again into his habitual enigmatic smile. ‘What a curious little speech.’
Tara judged she had hit the nail on the head and felt herself relax.
Xavier turned off the motorway at the next exit, easing the car to a sedate seventy miles an hour. He reached out and pressed a black button on the dashboard. Music surged from an array of speakers: Bach, one of the Brandenburg Concertos. Tara’s uncertainties and unease began to fall away from her with the smooth swiftness of rain coursing down sheet glass. A spring of sheer joy bubbled up inside as the clear notes of a flute, oboe and violin intertwined their voices in a musical conversation of radiant beauty. A smile of pure pleasure lit up her face.
‘I used to play fragments from the Brandenburgs with my father,’ she told Xavier.
He nodded.
‘Years ago when I was just a kid.’
‘Before you shot yourself in the foot,’ he observed drily.
‘What?’
‘Rejected your musical talent and also him for some incomprehensible reason, murdered your future prospects as a player.’
Tara was utterly dismayed.
‘You’ve been a stupid fool, haven’t you?’
She flinched, angry and wounded. ‘You don’t begin to understand!’
‘I most certainly do not. Do you?’
She stared at him, her eyes wide with pain. ‘No,’ she said in a low voice.
He drew up beside her house and killed the whining engine.
Tara turned to him. ‘Thank you,’ she said solemnly.
‘Today was helpful?’ he wondered.
‘Yes. Playing for Monica, being scared out of my wits, realizing how much damage I’ve done… All of it.’
‘So – what will you do with your life?’
Her eyes swam with tears.’ She shook her head.
‘I’ll see you into the house,’ he said.
He stood in the hallway, a tall impassive figure looking down at her, his face neutral. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Yes. Would you like some tea before you go?’
He inclined his head graciously.
Tara went into the kitchen. The telephone on the wall rang.
‘Tara – it’s Mum. I’ve had to stay late at the surgery.’ A pause. ‘Donald has suggested we go and get something to eat together.’
Tara heard the hesitation in her mother’s voice. It had the effect of irritating her intensely, just as Bruno did when he skirted around her, anxious not to offend. ‘Donald’s invited you to dinner! Well, that’s great. Have a lovely time,’ she said cheerily.
‘Yes, well look…’
‘Mum! You’re perfectly entitled to go out for a meal without getting my approval. I’ll expect you when I see you. Right?’ Tara put the phone down and looked at it thoughtfully.
She found Xavier sitting motionless on the sofa, his hands lightly folded in his lap.
Tara handed him a steaming mug, then sat down opposite him staring into her own drink. ‘My mother’s got a date with her boss. He’s a smooth talking doctor who just happens to be a lonely and available widower. Isn’t that nice for both of them?’ she said sarcastically.
‘It probably is,’ Xavier agreed evenly.
The bitch! Tara thought, her eyes narrowing with resentment at the idea of her mother swanning off to some restaurant with another man when her father was hardly off the scene. She glanced at Xavier. She sensed that he was acutely aware of the hostility and bitterness that churned inside her, but that he would probably choose to ignore it.
She had never come across anyone like him. His detachment was such she could imagine herself feeling free to reveal anything to him, however vile or shocking. Moreover, as her gaze moved from his icy grey eyes to his long slender hands the issue of his sexuality suddenly crossed her mind, making her wonder how he ever managed to let go enough to perform the undignified contortions involved in the sex act.
The telephone rang again. This time it was Bruno, anxious to know how she had gone on at the master class. As she began to respond in guarded tones, Xavier got up quietly, raised his hand in a small gesture of farewell, and left the room. She heard the click of the front door and then the high whin
e of the Porsche.
‘Darling, are you all right?’ Bruno enquired kindly after she had completed her story and they had progressed to more general subjects.
‘Perfectly,’ she snapped.
‘When can I see you?’
‘Oh, soon. I don’t think I should go out too much. It’s not good for Mum to be on her own just at present.’ She was not sure of her motivation in telling this lie.
‘Yes, of course. What about the weekend?’
‘Fine. We’ll fix something definite next time we talk.’
‘Are you sure there isn’t anything wrong? It isn’t me is it? Have I made you cross?’
Tara grimaced in exasperation. ‘No. No – it isn’t you.’
When Bruno put the phone down he found that he was taking deep heavy breaths. He sensed that something momentous had happened, that some fundamental change had taken place which might alter his life.
The terrifying possibility of losing Tara spun in his head, and his steps were dizzy and uncoordinated as he walked down the corridor back to his little room and the book-laden desk.
CHAPTER 8
Georgiana was agitated. The air around her seemed to crackle with feeling as she walked though the door of Dr Denton’s consulting room. Denton watched her closely as she slipped off her shoes and swung her long slim legs onto the leather plateau of the therapy couch.
‘Can you cure me?’ she asked him abruptly, her blue eyes wide open and glittering with a mingle of emotions.
He attempted to identify them. Anxiety? Indignation? Or perhaps something stronger. Terror. Outrage. ‘Do you consider yourself to be ill?’ he said mildly.
‘If not then why do I come to you?’
‘To learn more about yourself.’
‘I come because I am frigid,’ she told him, spitting out the last word with contemptuous emphasis.
This was interesting. Georgiana had never used that word before. She had told Dr Denton with wistful regret that she and her husband had not slept together for a time, that he was a very busy man and did not find it easy to relax, that his tension in turn strung her up so she found it hard to respond as a loving wife should. She had been tenderly regretful as she told him this emphasising how much she loved her husband, how she longed to make him happy, to be the perfect wife.
‘You feel guilty about that?’ he asked her.
‘I have nothing to feel guilty about. I have done my very best to make our marriage perfect. My parents used to tell me that it was the trying that counted, not the outcome. They understood me,’ she finished bitterly.
Georgiana felt as if the inside of her head was on fire. Xavier had never understood her. He had been generous and considerate, but he had never idolized her, placed her on a golden pedestal. And now he had rejected her very best efforts on his behalf.
She heard again his calm, cool words; so polite, so controlled and reasonable. Those words rang on in her head, punishing and humiliating her.
Xavier’s quiet directive had come out of the blue, just a few days after that last wonderful gift she had offered him, just as she was congratulating herself on her continuing ingenuity in breathing life into her marriage.
‘No more charming “gifts” darling – mmn?’ he had told her. ‘Little games are entertaining for a while, but I think it’s time to stop now.’ He had taken her gently in his arms, terrifying her with the prospect of a fresh assault on her virginity – for it was as a virgin that she saw herself after the years of chastity.
Dr Denton watched her contorted face. He waited. She wrapped her arms around herself and then, dismissing Xavier from her mind, embarked on her favourite pastime – taking herself back to her golden childhood. ‘My mummy and daddy used to say that nothing would ever harm their little baby,’ she told him. ‘If the cold east wind tried to touch a hair of her little blonde head they would trap it in a bottle and put the cork on so tightly it would fizzle away to nothing.’
Dr Denton believed her. Gradually over the weeks he had come to the conclusion that Georgiana’s problems lay, not in dealing with the loss of her baby, but in finally accepting the loss of her childhood. At first he had thought her eulogizing was some kind of fantasy. But then the picture began to emerge as the truth. She had never known need or cruelty, there had been no traumas, no illness or untimely deaths. Home had been a warm pool of love peopled by parents who made a goddess of her.
Clearly Georgiana had had a wonderful time controlling them. Whatever she wanted they had given her: approval, attention, love. And material goods – oh, lots of material goods.
The adult Georgiana went about the world in disguise, presenting herself as an object of beauty and genteel leisure. Trophy-offspring transformed into trophy-wife. There was no career, no drudgery of housework, no children.
Dr Denton considered that inwardly Georgiana’s passivity concealed a ferocious inner drive. Georgiana was still the narcissistic baby who had sought control of the world and gained it. Why should she give it up?
A job would have been out of the question. A job would have made demands on her. Moreover Georgiana would only be happy as the boss. She must control things. But she had neither the maturity nor the necessary skills to obtain a position as a leader.
The act of sex would be even more damaging than a job, far too threatening for her mammoth child’s ego to withstand. To be penetrated by a powerful man would be deeply painful psychologically. Maybe physically painful also. And ironically she had chosen to marry the dynamic, dominating Xavier who would have no intention of being anything but in full control himself.
Georgiana would have no way of understanding that. She would, of course, have regarded the snaring of him as a great achievement. A beautiful girl gets presents. She gets dolls and clothes and puppies and diamonds. And when she is old enough she must get a man worthy of her feminine perfection and prove to other women how superior she is.
Xavier must have been a real catch: brilliant, talented, famous and wildly attractive. An international hero. Entirely worthy.
But now Georgiana’s marriage was faltering as she and Xavier struggled for power and he refused to bow any longer to the demands of a wife who was a sexual failure and had a pathologically undeveloped appreciation of the way her fellow human beings ticked.
Dr Denton found himself fascinated. He speculated on the nature of her sexual encounters with Xavier but she remained stubbornly silent on that subject. ‘Do you want to change?’ he asked her. ‘As a person?’
Her eyelids flickered. A slow smile crept over her face. ‘No – no, not at all.’
Dr Denton smiled. He doubted she would ever change. What motivation was there? She truly believed herself perfect. He imagined her naked, the smooth skin, the elegant bone structure, the small breasts with rosy nipples. Her buttocks would be soft ellipses; if she turned her back to him and bent over with her long legs together those globes would form a perfect heart.
His pulse quickened. As the light on his tape recorder winked and Georgiana’s voice chimed in the background he allowed his mind to play out a fantasy where he delicately peeled off her clothes and using the most gentle, most leisurely touches of his lips and fingers brought her to a shuddering climax which made her his slave.
CHAPTER 9
Bruno walked with Tara along the embankment. Looking down at her he felt a painful lurch of tenderness. He had known as soon as she arrived at his room earlier on that his terrifying premonition of losing her was about to become reality. Sadness welled up inside him.
She had spoken hardly a word in the past hour, her face still and solemn.
‘What’s the matter, darling?’ he asked gently.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’ Tears glittered on her eyelashes.
‘It’s hardly any time at all since your father died —‘
‘No,’ she interrupted softly, sending a chill to his heart, ‘no, it’s not that. I just feel…well, I think we should stop seeing each other for a
while.’
It was incomprehensible to him. They got on so well. He loved her so much. There would never be anyone else. Never.
He took her hand. She held on tightly, trying to make things easier for him. Bruno sensed her pity, which only made the hurt worse. He simply wanted to have her with him for ever.
‘There’s no one else,’ she said truthfully.
He winced. It was more than two weeks since they had made love and his body ached for her. The mere thought of another man possessing her engulfed him in a fresh wave of misery.
‘Good!’ he said. Because I’d have killed him. GBH at the very least!’ He forced the words to emerge with delicate irony. On no account was she to guess the extent of his grief.
‘I’m being such a bitch!’ she wailed. ‘I just don’t seem to be able to get anything right at the moment.’
‘For me you do,’ he said with quiet sincerity. ‘This last year has been the best of my life – simply because of being with you.’
Getting it right, he thought. He had thought about that endlessly ever since he had asked her on the telephone if he had done anything wrong. He knew that if it were possible to start again, one thing he must never do was let her guess the extent of his adoration. He guessed he had smothered her with it, given her no space to breathe. Even that last little speech had been just the kind of thing to chase her away. He had, in fact, done everything completely wrong.
He saw it all now with perfect clarity. And at the same time he knew that even with the miracle of a second chance with Tara he would make exactly the same mistakes. But then if you really loved someone there was no way of concealing it. And on the whole that meant you were doomed to suffer.
He took her to the train. He kissed her and told her she was very brave to have been so honest with him. As the train lurched into movement he saw the tears glistening on her beloved face.
‘Cheer up,’ he mouthed to her, waving, smiling, keeping his own emotions locked tightly behind the required façade of manliness as he made his way out of the station. Squaring his shoulders he plunged bravely into the road beyond.
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