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The Deception Trap

Page 16

by Ann Charlton


  He gave that some thought, then dropped her on to the bed. But he followed her, throwing an arm across her body. ‘Ummm, you’ve got a lovely bed…’ he mumbled lover-like into the pillow, and clutched her close. Teressa lay very still. Minutes later she was rewarded with a snore. Tony was asleep.

  ‘Whew!’ She slid carefully to her feet and looked at her visitor. Black-browed, curly-haired and olive-skinned, he looked like an appealing little boy asleep.

  His full, curved mouth was open and one hand supported his cheek. Teressa sighed.

  ‘Why couldn’t you have found a nice Italian girl in your papa’s vineyards?’

  His bag was outside the door. Teressa brought it in and took another peek at him. Out like a light. And if he stayed that way, she had no problems. If he woke in an amorous mood … When Thelma came home,

  Teressa went over and explained her problem.

  ‘Even if I could force him to leave, 1 don’t know if he’s got a booking anywhere. Besides, he’s my sister’s brother-in-law and 1don’t want to upset the family by turning him out. Could 1sleep on your couch tonight?’

  Thelma would be delighted. A sensible idea, she approved. And as Teressa looked so tired, she would take her television into her bedroom so that the late night soapies wouldn’t interrupt her rest. It was a valiant offer from one who loved to talk through all the commercials. But, nevertheless, Teressa didn’t get her rest. She lay awake trying to separate truth from falsity and had no success at all.

  Thelma was still asleep when Teressa went home the next morning. But Tony was awake and sober. He was holding his head and sitting glumly in the livingroom.

  Four cups of coffee and a shower later, he showed signs of improvement.

  ‘You forgot to shave,’ she told him as an amorous warmth began to replace self-pity in his brown eyes.

  He took his shaving gear obediently to the bathroom.

  Teressa went to her bedroom and locked the door so that she could change into office clothes. She wasn’t sure just what she would do today. But she had to look busy in order to move Tony on his way. Her brain felt as fuzzed as Tony’s, but for different reasons. The Ashe she thought she had come to know surely would not playa cat-and-mouse game with one girl while he planned marriage with another. Would he?

  She heard the knock at the door faintly and got up.

  That would be Thelma, come to check up on the behaviour of her guest. He would get a lecture on drinking and irresponsibility in all probability.

  Tony had the door open. Shaving cream still covered half of his face. The other half was smooth.

  His razor was in his hand and he wore only his tight-fitting pants and a towel-around his neck.

  Beyond him, outside the door, stood Ashe. ‘Who are you?’ he asked curtly.

  ‘Tony Manetti. Did you want Teressa?’

  ‘I thought I did.' he snapped, and his eyes met hers over Tony’s shoulder. There was a topaz blaze of anger, then a chill hardening.

  ‘Someone to see you, Teressa.' said Tony with an odd look as if he were picking up vibrations.

  ‘Thanks, Tony. It’s—my boss,’ she said, and he took a last look at Ashe before going back to the bathroom.

  ‘Tony. So that’s your boring footballer,’ drawled Ashe with distaste. ‘He appears to have certain obvious assets you didn’t mention. He stayed the night?’ His voice was steel grating over pebbles.

  Contempt was frozen into every line of his face. He had already made his assumptions. Amusing really, how he could sound almost accusing when he himself was playing a double game.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Come to dinner at my place,’ she’d invited him revealingly, with her declaration of love in her eyes for him to read. And he had been tied up. Permanently.

  ‘Why?’ he asked on a slightly ragged note. The thought ran through Teressa’s head that something was not quite right. But his contempt was stinging, stabbing.

  ‘I asked you, but you were—too busy.’ Ashe didn’t respond to her sarcastic emphasis on the last. He was silent, looking her over as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  ‘I almost made a monumental mistake,’ he said at last. ‘And I never thought I would again.’

  In the circumstances, it was an odd thing to say. But he gave her no chance to question it. He turned and strode away. His shoes clicked on the stairs. Teressa slammed the door. It wasn’t the first time she’d pretended to be what she wasn’t to Ashe.

  But it would be the last. .

  Tony winced at the door slam. He accepted her silence about the visit, absorbed, Teressa supposed, with his own immediate hangover problems. All in all, it was a half-hearted discussion that followed, covering enquiries about his family and his burgeoning football career. Then she bluntly told him that he would have to move to a hotel.

  ‘Aw. thought we could spend some time together,’ he objected, and showed signs of a bear-hug coming on. Teressa sidestepped.

  ‘I have to work, Tony. And besides—’ she searched for something stronger with which to combat that look in his eyes, ‘—there’s someone else.’

  He was belligerent. ‘That fellow that called—your boss?’ he demanded.

  ‘No, he’s not the one,’ she said painfully.

  Tony remained angry. Luckily his head was aching again, too much for him to indulge in more than moody, injured looks from beneath lush brows.

  Without demur he allowed her to drive him to the hotel where his mate was staying. ‘I’ll phone you,’ he said. ‘I noticed you’ve got the phone on now and took the number.’

  Teressa winced. That was the end of that little deception. ‘Fine, Tony. We must have dinner or something before you go back.’ Drat it, she thought, as she drove home again. The suggestion had sprung from guilty conscience and from family obligation more than anything, but Tony’s eyes had brightened.

  She just didn’t seem to be able to manage her life without building in problems.

  But Tony was a minor consideration. She was more desolate than ever when she let herself into her flat again. Thelma was at her door not long after and Teressa asked her in, glad to have some uncomplicated company.

  ‘My dear, you don’t look well. That Italian friend of yours didn’t cause any trouble, did he?’

  ‘No. He’s gone to a hotel now. I’m not working today.’ Teressa added in response to Thelma’s keen, unspoken query. She put tea-leaves in the pot. 'I won’t be working for Ashe—Mr. Warwick any more.’

  ‘Oh ? Last night he was talking as if you were—’

  ‘Last night? You saw him last night?’

  ‘Well yes, dear.’ Thelma looked a bit puzzled. ‘In his office. An American gentleman came in before I left. My, such a big man too! Mr. Warwick was going to take him to dinner at one of those diet restaurants—one of those faddish eaters, by the sound of him. I must say it’s terrible that Mr. Warwick can’t even have a holiday without having to––-'

  ‘But he was going to see Lara Moore last night. She said so on the telephone.’

  Thelma pursed her lips. ‘Well now, her fellow wouldn’t like that surely.’

  ‘Her—?’

  ‘Fiance. You know—I told you last night dear. But you know she’s getting engaged to her business partner, don’t you? John someone. It just shows you can’t rely on gossip, doesn’t it? For a while there I thought she was going to marry Mr. Warwick.’ Her pale blue eyes studied Teressa shrewdly. ‘I suppose you thought so too, dear.’

  The kettle shrieked and belched clouds of steam.

  Thelma gently pushed Teressa out of the way and turned it off.

  ‘Oh, Thelma! I thought—yesterday when she rang at his house, then you said she was getting engaged. I should have guessed it was John. Down at Deception she was jealous of Wendy and even of me when he put his arm around me … '

  ‘Don’t think you came between Ashe and me’, Lara had said—but from pride. Even being newly engaged, she wouldn’t want Teressa to think that she had broken
up any arrangement between Lara and Ashe.

  The present was very likely Ashe’s gift to both Lara and John—not, as she’d thought, one of many for Lara and Ashe.

  ‘This morning, Ashe called here and I let him think—but only because—I must have been out of my mind to think he could do it,’ said Teressa unhappily.

  Thelma probed a little and made surprising sense of it. ‘When he called here I suppose your Italian friend was around.’

  ‘He answered the door, with shaving cream on his face;’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Thelma shook her head. ‘Then you’ll have to put him right, won’t you?’

  Teressa postponed it for an hour. Finally she dialled Ashe’s home number.

  ‘Yes?’ he clipped, and she gulped. How to say that she thought he was going to marry Lara and as a result had allowed him to think she spent the night with Tony? It made her sound more idiotic than she’d ever been at sixteen. It was a kind of craziness, being new to love.

  ‘Ashe, it’s Teressa. About this morning—’

  ‘This morning, Teressa? Put it right out of your mind.’

  ‘But I want to tell you why Tony was—’

  ‘Please, spare me the details. You were quite explicit at the time. I was too busy and you went elsewhere. It has a familiar ring to it.’

  ‘Ashe, I’m not what you think I am.’

  ‘You are now,’ he told her. ‘I fell for your first innocent act and for a while there I looked like falling for the second. History has a way of repeating itself, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with Tony.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did,’ he said, sending a blizzard blast along the wires. ‘He looked exhausted.’

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t like that—really—’

  Tears sprang to her eyes. She clenched the phone as if it was her last touch of Ashe.

  ‘Having second thoughts, Teressa? Wishing you’d played the game fair and square after all? I’m not a bad catch, am I—as you took pains to find out. And here’s a finishing touch that should appeal to you. Had you been alone this morning, you could by now be wearing my ring. If, of course, anything so old-fashioned interested you. Have a laugh about that with your muscle-bound friend!’

  The call crashed to a stop. And Teressa wept.

  A concerned Thelma Richards heard all about it later that day. The whole story poured out—Teressa’s unrecognised crush on Ashe at sixteen, the jealousy of her sister that had its parallel later in jealousy of Lara, the wish to hurt him in some way, the gradual realisation that he could not be what she thought.

  Love and questions and few, few answers.

  ‘It will all come out in the end,’ Thelma comforted her, but she didn’t look too certain.

  ‘It won’t. I’ve told him the truth about Tony and he hardly listened.’

  ‘Did you tell him you slept the night in my place?’

  ‘I didn’t get a chance. And he wouldn’t believe me now. 1mean, I actually told him it was true.’ She paced about. ‘But surely he could see that I wouldn’t really do a thing like that-s-oh, Thelma, how can 1ever explain that 1 was such an idiot?’

  ‘I can guarantee it will all turn out right,’ Thelma announced with a great deal more confidence.

  ‘Because he’s the right man my dear, mark my words. I’ve had a feeling for a while.’

  Suspiciously, Teressa eyed her neighbour. ‘Thelma, you won’t repeat any of this? Anything you said could only make it worse. He’d think we were scheming to fool him again. Promise me you won’t say a word about this in the office.’

  The little woman was reproachful. ‘As if I would! You can rely on me, Teressa.’

  Tuesday dragged. Teressa had a vague hope that Ashe might, on reflection, see he had misjudged her—just as she had him. But he didn’t contact her. Jane rang, philosophical about Teressa’s break with Joel. She assumed that Joel had dropped her and not the other way around. He had saved face, apparently. Teressa didn’t bother to correct her and Jane was full of sympathy, no doubt interpreting her lackluster conversation as a languishing for her playboy brother. At least Raine Merrow would be happy.

  Wednesday. And Thursday. Silence from Ashe.

  Teressa went back to work for the temp agency. The hotel told her that she could start her receptionist job in two weeks. That week, there were no postcards from Cecily. Thelma had received none from Dan, her youngest. Teressa received several phone calls and one visit from Tony. Fortunately, Thelma was present when he came and he went away again, driven back to his hotel by the little woman’s homily on drinking and gross irresponsibility in turning up unannounced at the flats of respectable girls. Teressa relented on the weekend and accompanied him on a tour around Sydney. If Tony had ideas other than a boat tour of the harbour and a visit to Vaucluse House, he accepted the substitutes very well.

  ‘When do you go home. Tony?’ she asked him on Sunday.

  ‘Tuesday,’ he said with a suggestion of a pout.

  ‘What about Monday night for that dinner you mentioned?'

  She smiled. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Won’t your new boyfriend object?’

  Teressa viewed the Vaucluse House stables—the stone of the Tudor-Gothic facade was pale and mellow in brilliant sunshine. In her ears roared the hollow sound of a blizzard. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  Questions and answers. On Monday evening at about six, Teressa got an answer at last to something that had, in one way and another, bothered her since she was sixteen.

  Cecily rang on a fading-swelling line from Italy.

  ‘It’s morning here,’ she said, then plunged right in without greetings. ‘I got both your last letters—what on earth are you doing mixed up with Ashe? What do you mean you’ll be seeing a lot of him?’ Teressa started to tell her that she was no longer mixed up with him, but Cecily went right on. ‘I suppose he’s blabbed it all now. And he promised not to because you and Dad were so darned prudish!’

  ‘Prudish?’ Teressa swallowed. ‘What has that to do with—’

  ‘I wanted to have some fun. And Ashe was a positive stick-in-the-mud in some ways—always busy and always wanting to wait … ‘ Her voice faded.

  Teressa jammed the phone against her ear. ‘—he should have been born centuries ago.’ There was a hollow sound on the line. The words rose and fell.

  ‘1 was too busy and you went elsewhere … it has a familiar ring to it—’, ‘history has a way of repeating itself —’ It was loyalty, a fierce clinging to the last of her diminishing family that had distorted her view of Cecily. Her sister’s free life-style had not been pure reaction to Ashe’s rejection. She had been like that all along. Damien had indulged her, made excuses for her, and after he’d died, Teressa had done likewise.

  ‘You had an affair while you were engaged to him,’ she said heavily.

  ‘Lord, you sound just like Elaine!’ Cecily exclaimed. ‘This is the twentieth century, you know—I was only twenty and I wanted some fun. You know me,’ she said cajolingly.

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder. Ashe kept his promise, Cecily—he hasn’t told me a thing.’ Teressa’s voice took a sharp rise. ‘You cheated him and that was bad enough, but how could you tell lies about him. How could you let Dad think he was after his money? My God, I—I could kill you, Cecily!’

  Her sister was taken aback. ‘Tess, why are you so angry?’

  ‘Because I love him, damn you! I love him!’ Teressa shouted across the world.

  ‘Oh, my lord—’ Cecily actually seemed to see the ramifications for once. Teressa felt murderous.

  ‘Tess, you won’t say anything about it to Mike, will you?’ She sounded anxious, and it was a relief to know that she had found someone she couldn’t bear to lose.

  ‘It’s not that he thinks I’m exactly an innocent, but—’

  ‘Don’t worry, Cecily. Mike won’t hear about your previous conquests from me…’

  ‘I’ll never forgive you, Cecily!’ cried Teressa long afte
r she’d put the phone down. By keeping that promise Ashe had been unable to come up with any convincing reasons for dodging out on the engagement at a time of upheaval. And pushing Cecily for something more concrete, Damien had found his daughter’s story only too believable when all around him rats were deserting the sinking Radcliffe ship.

  She herself, bound by blind loyalty to Cecily, deceiving herself into disliking Ashe instead of accepting her vulnerability, had found it easy to believe the worst of him, too. Her loyalty to Cecily … he had commented on it more than once. Ashe hadn’t wanted to disillusion her. She remembered saying something of the sort herself about Thelma’s immense respect for him. Ironic. He had patiently borne her own wildly wrong impression of him to protect her from hurt and to honour an old promise. A man who cared.

 

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