Silver Shadows, Golden Dreams

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘He knows, Kariana. I told him a long time ago.’

  She shook her head vehemently. ‘No! He can’t know! He wouldn’t want to marry me if he knew!’

  ‘He does know.’ He couldn’t bring himself to mention Hazel’s name. ‘He knows that you were sick. That you didn’t know what you were doing.’

  ‘You don’t believe that though, do you?’ The hysteria was back in her voice. ‘You sent me away! You couldn’t bear to look at me.’

  ‘I sent you away so that Doctor Grossman could take care of you.’

  She seized his arm, digging her nails through his tuxedo and into his flesh. ‘You sent me away so that you could marry Valentina! You lied about Hazel! It never happened. You made it up so that you could get rid of me!’

  ‘Kariana, for God’s sake…’ The car veered into the righthand lane and then back away. He tried to shake himself free and she scrambled to her knees on the seat, pummelling his head dementedly with her clenched fists.

  ‘You wanted to marry Hazel, and now you want to marry Valentina!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ He flung her away from him as the limousine swerved crazily across the highway. The lights of an on-coming car hurtled towards them and he swung the wheel savagely to the right, only just missing it.

  Kariana’s face was contorted with fury, her hands clawed as she tried to strike out at his face. ‘I’ll die, but I won’t let you marry her! I won’t! I won’t!’

  He tried to fend her off with one hand and keep control of the car with the other. He was aware of cars whizzing past in the opposite direction; of their horns blaring.

  ‘You promised me that I would never have to face the dark alone!’ she screamed, flinging herself bodily across him, pulling the wheel savagely to the left with both hands. ‘You’re going to keep your promise to me, Vidal! You’re going to keep your promise!’

  The limousine careered across the darkened highway as he struggled to wrest the wheel from her grasp. The world swung in a sickening lurch and then time hung suspended. Kariana’s eyes were wide with horror, her mouth a gaping hole as the car slammed into the solidity of concrete and the night split and wheeled.

  He was plummeted into a world of spiralling blackness and then, as if from a great distance, he saw the first stabs of flame shoot high into the sky and heard the roar as they sucked in air and exploded upwards. He tried to call Valentina’s name but no sound would come. He was aware of an insane desire to laugh. It had all been for nothing. Kariana and the consuming flames had been victorious after all.

  ‘Where’s Vidal?’ she asked as she came off stage shortly before the end of act one.

  ‘He was called away,’ said the actor who was playing the role of her husband.

  She frowned, perplexed. Their whole professional future hung on the outcome of the performance she was now giving. What could possibly have been so important that it had called him away?

  Throughout the second and third acts her anxiety grew and then, as the final curtain fell, there was no room for anxiety: only the heady intoxication of triumph.

  The applause was thunderous as the audience rose to its feet in a united act of unstinted acclaim.

  ‘Bravo Valentina!’ ‘Bravo Rakocz!’ ‘Bravo Valentina!’ ‘Valen-tina! Val-en-tina!’

  The applause was intensified, thundering in her ears, deafening her. The moment belonged to her and Vidal. She ran towards the wings to draw him onstage, her face radiant, her hands outstretched. ‘Vidal! Vidal!’

  The curtain rose and fell and rose again and the stage remained empty. Sutton grasped her hands, his eyes black pits in the whiteness of his face. The telephone call had been received only minutes earlier.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said, his voice full of disbelief. ‘Valentina, Vidal is dead.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The applause reverberated around their ears; feet were stamping and her name echoed and re-echoed. She didn’t cry out. She simply stood and stared, a carved effigy with a bloodless face. All around her people were crying. Sutton put his arm around her shoulders, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  ‘Where is Alexander?’ she asked, her voice strange and disembodied.

  ‘Out front. Leila has gone to get him away from the theatre.’

  She stared at Sutton. ‘What did the police say?’ she asked stiltedly.

  ‘That Vidal’s limousine had crashed on the highway. That it was burnt out. That they were on their way here to speak to you.’

  ‘Let me fix you a drink, darling,’ someone was saying. Someone else rushed for her mink and placed it around her shoulders. She shook her head. She wanted no drink; no company; no empty words of sympathy. When she walked away, no one had the temerity to follow her.

  ‘Oh Jesus God,’ Sutton said and wiped his eyes with his hands as the stage manager went on stage to quell the almost rioting audience.

  She didn’t go to her dressing room. Still in the emerald velvet gown she had worn in the last act of the play, she stepped out into the night air.

  Why had he left the theatre? Where had he been going? The crowds that would surge any second around the stage door were still mercifully absent. The night wind was cool on her face. There was no answer. For the rest of her life she would wonder, and she would never know. ‘Is anything wrong, madam?’ her chauffeur asked hesitantly.

  She looked across at him, the tears glittering in her eyes. ‘He’s dead,’ she said simply. ‘Vidal is dead and I will never see him again.’ And then she took the keys from his gloved hand and slid behind the wheel of the Rolls.

  ‘Madam…’ he protested as she revved the engine. She ignored him. Vidal was dead and life no longer had any meaning.

  She took the road south, her eyes blinded by tears. She could not remain in the theatre, surrounded by helpless pity. She could not face the police and their clinical details that were of no interest to her. He was dead. She needed to know nothing more.

  She left the city behind her. It was not their city. He had not lived to enjoy the knowledge that, together, they had triumphed. The Santa Cruz Mountains stood high and gaunt against the moonlit sky. He had not heard the applause. He had not been there when she had, for a brief second, thought that the world was at their feet.

  She seldom drove and rarely drove fast. Now her eyes did not flicker to the speedometer as the needle wavered from sixty to seventy. From seventy to eighty. Monteray Bay gleamed silkily on her right, and then the Pacific was lost to view and she was speeding south through Pasa Robles, through San Luis Obispo.

  When she entered the massive sprawl of Los Angeles she did not take the route that would have led her to Hollywood: to Worldwide Studios: to home. Instead, she kept her foot hard on the accelerator and kept going south. Instinct as old as man was driving her. Like the swallows, she was succumbing to primitive nature and without thought or reason she was returning from whence she had come.

  She didn’t drive into Capistrano. She parked on the outskirts and walked through the darkness, far off the road and high up into the hills. The heels of her shoes dug deep in the soft earth, the hem of the dress she had worn as Regina Giddens trailing in the grass behind her. She hugged her mink coat around her and halted, her hands deep in the silk-lined pockets as she waited for the dawn.

  It came slowly, the sky pearling from black to grey to the first faint hints of gold. She could see the town and the convent some distance from it. The high wrought iron gates that she had flung herself so passionately and so vainly against as a child.

  The sun rose, tinting the convent’s coral-pink tiles with soft light, sparkling on the fountain in the centre of the small courtyard. A black-robed figure hurried across to the chapel and early morning prayers. The drone of childish voices carried on the still morning air. She pulled the mink closer around her throat, her hair blowing softly against her face.

  It was St Joseph’s day. Her wedding day. Camera-slung tourists were beginning to stroll the streets. Perhaps, in the distant convent, a smal
l child in a coarse linen dress and heavy shoes was waiting eagerly for the first swallow to wing magically in from the sea, as she had waited so many years ago.

  ‘Take the road south,’ she whispered to the child of her imagination. ‘Take the road south to San Diego and anonymity,’ and then her hand closed around the gold swallow at her throat. She could never have taken that road: it had not been in San Diego that Vidal had been waiting for her. And now he was waiting for her no longer. She raised her face to the sun and let the tears fall and then she turned on her heel and began to walk blindly in the direction of her car.

  When they had told him that she believed him dead and that no one could find her, he had known where she had gone and he had followed her through the night, his broken ribs strapped tightly, his fractured arm in a sling. They had all tried to stop him. The doctors; the nurses; Sutton and Leila. He had ignored them all. It was their wedding day. He had to reach her. Had to find her.

  He had taken the turning for San Juan Capistrano and had thanked God when he had seen the parked Rolls. In a cloud of dust he had swerved to a halt behind it and then, agonizingly, had eased himself from behind the wheel and surveyed the hillside with anxious eyes.

  She was standing on the crown of the hill, her face raised to the sun, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat. With a sob of relief he began to cross the road to the foot of the hill.

  At first she did not recognize him. Through the mist of her tears all she was aware of was a dark figure climbing the hill towards her. His coat hung awkwardly around his shoulders and she saw that one arm was strapped close to his chest in a sling. Her heart began to slam and the blood began to beat in her ears. He looked like Vidal, he moved like Vidal.

  She halted, not daring to breathe, poised on the hillside, the high collar of her fur brushing against the pure line of her chin and jaw.

  ‘Vidal,’ she whispered unbelievingly, and then, as he raised his head and she saw the unmistakeable tumble of dark hair falling low across his brow: ‘Vidal! Oh God, Vidal!’

  She was running, stumbling, hurtling over the dew-wet grass. He was alive and he was waiting for her and the nightmare was over. As she fell against him and he caught her with his uninjured arm, his mouth crushed hers and the last miasma of doubt was banished.

  ‘Oh my love, my life,’ she whispered, raising her radiant, tear-streaked face to his. ‘They told me that you were dead!’

  Tenderly he brushed away her tears. ‘Kariana is dead,’ he said gently. ‘I was thrown clear yards before the car exploded. When the police arrived at the theatre to tell you, you had gone.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, touching his face with reverent fingers.

  ‘Quite a lot,’ he said with a grin. ‘Hospitals don’t like their patients walking out on them in the middle of the night. Sutton told me that you hadn’t been seen since he had broken the news to you, and so I came here.’

  She stared up at him in bewilderment. ‘But why here? How could you possibly have known?’

  A swallow circled their heads, swooping and soaring, its dark plumage glistening in the sunlight. He gazed up at it, his arm tightening around her shoulders.

  ‘How do the swallows know when and where to return? I came here because I knew that this was where you would be.’ He tilted her face to his. ‘Because I am Rakoczi and because I love you. Because you will never be lost to me. Never.’ And as he bent his head to hers, the first swallow was followed by another and another until the air was filled with the soft churr of their cries and the sound of their endlessly beating wings.

  Copyright

  First published in 1982 by Macdonald

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  www.curtisbrown.co.uk

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3006-9 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3005-2 POD

  Copyright © Margaret Pemberton, 1982

  The right of Margaret Pemberton to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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