Something Stupid

by Victoria Corby

I couldn’t speak. It seemed as if my tongue had grown too big for my mouth. I had never heard threats being made against someone else before, except of the ‘I’ll make him sorry he ditched me’ sort. I couldn’t think what to say. Was there any point? Stefano had made up his mind with a blind, unstoppable obstinacy and I couldn’t see that any words of mine were going to make any difference. I half lifted my coffee cup and saw to my surprise that somehow I’d drunk it without noticing. I swallowed hard, pushing against the lump that was blocking my throat, and shook my head to clear it.

  Stefano’s dark eyes were boring into me. ‘You do not appear to be shocked,’ he said finally when it became obvious that I was still struck dumb. His tone sharpened in suspicion. ‘So you were planning this with them? Your visit to us was part of an elaborate trick.’

  I flinched at how uncomfortably close to the truth at least part of his accusation was.

  He half rose, saying furiously, ‘Putana! You did know!’

  I shrank back in my seat. Costas dropped the towel he was using to polish water glasses and moved pointedly around the counter to our table where all six foot four of him loomed comfortingly over the pair of us. ‘Anything you need, Laura?’ he asked meaningfully.

  Stefano subsided, looking shocked with himself, the flash of rage dissipating.

  ‘A glass of water, please,’ I whis­pered, and gathering all my reserves of acting ability looked at Stefano. ‘If I’m calm it’s because your accusations are so outrageous that they’re laughable,’ I said coldly. ‘I don’t believe it. I especially don’t believe James would encourage Cressida to nick your china. He isn’t dishonest.’

  Stefano laughed. ‘If you believe that you are either really in love with him or very foolish.’

  The patronising, pat the little girl on the head edge to his voice really got me annoyed, especially as apparently he himself was a fine one to talk about dishonesty. And he was following a fine parental example too. ‘Why are you so blindly determined to believe that your wife is adulter­ous? I think you’d rather she has a lover than that she left you for some other reason - such as being unhappy over something.’

  He stared at me in surprise and outrage, a red flush spreading over his cheekbones. I wondered if I’d inad­vertently hit a sore spot and leaned towards him. ‘If you go around telling people she’s left you for a man when it was for something else entirely then she’ll never forgive you and you’ll have lost her forever.’ His eyes under their hooded lids widened in attention. ‘I’ll go and see James to find out if he knows or not what Cressida is up to.’

  I held up my hand as Stefano began to speak. ‘No, listen,’ I said with amazing firmness. ‘He’ll tell me the truth, even if it’s something he knows I don’t want to hear.’ Despite the fact I was sitting down my legs were still shaking like jelly. ‘But you aren’t to go near him.’ Stefano looked as if he was about to start objecting loudly so I added quickly, ‘Be sensible. If you go near James in your present mood you’ll end up hitting him. I don’t want to see either of you hurt - and, yes, he’s very strong - and you’d end up charged with assault too.’

  He shrugged. ‘It would be worth it.’

  God save me from macho males! ‘Worth looking stupid if it turns out you’ve beaten him up for nothing? And I doubt you’d be allowed bail. If you so much as lay a finger on James - or do anything else to harm him - I won’t have any hesitation in telling the police of the threats you made against him.’

  For the first time since he had burst into the office I saw Stefano relax a little. He smiled slightly. ‘Dear Laura,’ he said patronisingly, ‘one of the advantages of being very rich is that you have access to justice which the poor don’t have - the most expensive and influential counsels in the country. People like me do not go to prison.’

  I had a horrid feeling he was probably right. ‘Well, anyway,’ I said weakly, ‘it wouldn’t endear you to Cressida, would it?’

  He stared down at the table top for a few moments, then raised his head. ‘No, you are right,’ he said slowly, his voice suddenly devoid of all its underlying aggression. ‘She does not like violence.’

  I hadn’t realised I had been holding my breath. I let it out in an enormous rush, feeling almost light-headed with relief that for the time being Stefano wouldn’t be rushing around to the shop with intent to cause bodily harm. ‘So I’m the one to go and see James. Agreed?’ As he hesitated I added, ‘Don’t you think I have an interest in this too? I’m just as keen as you are to discover the truth. I promise that if she is with James I won’t hide it from you - though I might give them time to hide.’

  He sighed, all the pent-up rage seeming to slip away, leaving him curiously deflated. For the first time he looked every day of his age, older in fact, with tight lines of despair drawing down the corners of his mouth. He really did care about her, this wasn’t just bombast or infuriated pride at a trophy wife slipping out of his grasp. Maybe he had needed to whip up his anger against James to stop himself from collapsing entirely. I felt the beginnings of pity towards him and reminded myself you might feel sorry for a wounded tiger but that still didn’t mean you put your head in its mouth. He groped in his coat pocket and brought out a wallet, extracting a card which he flipped across the table to me. It had his name on it and several telephone numbers including a couple with international prefixes.

  ‘You can always find me on one of those, the last is a twenty-four-hour answering service. I will give you until tomorrow. After that I will feel free to do as I think fit.’ He looked at me with chilly dark eyes. ‘This does not mean I trust you, Laura. The only reason I am allowing you to do this at all is that I believe that you too do not want James Lovatt to run off with my wife.’ He pushed back his chair with a screech that set my already tattered nerves even more on edge, and threw a five-pound note on the counter with an instruction to Costas to keep the change. He turned his head and fixed me with an uncomfortably piercing look. ‘I will not tolerate you trying to deceive me again, Laura. Remember that.’

  CHAPTER 9

  It was some time and a coffee on the house before I could get my shaking legs in order and walk back to the office where our secretary, Lucy, slid out on to the landing and caught my wrist before I could go in. ‘Oh, Laura. I’m so sorry, it was all my fault,’ she said tearfully.

  I looked at her in surprise; the whole agency knows that Lucy has the brains of a gnat and owes her job to Daddy being one of our largest clients, but surely even she couldn’t really think she was the cause of Stefano’s jealous outpourings?

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He came around last night after you’d gone. He said it was urgent so I told him you’d said you were meeting Daniel in Bruce’s.’

  ‘So he asked who Daniel was and you told him?’ I said. She nodded, lower lip trembling. And luckily for my social credibility Stefano must have decided against creat­ing a scene in a crowded wine bar. That was one question answered; at least he didn’t have superhuman deductive powers. All the same I hoped the local axe murderer never rang Lucy asking for details of my itinerary.

  I assured her no real harm had been done, Stefano would probably have found out some other way, and went inside to be bombarded with excited questions. As Emma pointed out over coffee, biscuits and second-hand cigarette smoke over the photocopier, what with Hugo and now Stefano I was rapidly becoming a one-woman source of vicarious thrills and gossip for the whole agency. She didn’t think it quite so funny when I told her of Stefano’s threats. ‘Would you like to come and stay at my flat for a while? Then at least he won’t know where you’re living.’

  ‘Bless you,’ I said and meant it. Emma’s hot date had gradually metamorphosed into a hot prospect and she was reeling him in with all the skill Helen had used on Paris. The last thing she needed was an onlooker while she was trying to entice him with her superb cooking (local catering firm), skill at home-making (local cleaning agency), brilliant personality and superb figure in bank-balance-busting new dress - both Emma. ‘
I’m not afraid of Stefano - not for myself,’ I said, not sure if I was being absolutely truthful, and added teasingly, ‘But what about offering James a protective bolthole?'

  She pretended to consider for a moment. She’d been rather taken with James’s looks when she was doing her spying in the wine bar. ‘Nah. I wouldn’t want to spoil a beautiful friendship when you got antsy wondering what we were up to.’

  ‘I’d do no such thing.’

  She gave me a long and disbelieving look. ‘Since when have you been prepared to hand over one of your lovers to a friend, Laura Moreton?’ she asked loftily.

  I could feel myself blushing to the roots of my hair. ‘I’ve already explained that he’s not my lover,’ I said in a stiff voice. ‘So we shared a room - OK, a bed too - but that doesn’t mean anything happened.’

  ‘Talk about wasted opportunities,’ muttered Emma. ‘If it’s really true, which I doubt.’

  ‘Well, it is!’ I snapped grumpily. ‘James and I are just friends - and we aren’t even that a lot of the time,’ I amended, remembering what he could be like.

  She gave me a superior look. ‘Oh, yeah? Then why are you tangling yourself up with a nasty piece of work like that Stefano for a part-time friend, eh?’ She walked casually around to the other side of the photocopier so she was out of reach and rested her elbows on the top. ‘Bet you wouldn’t stand up to this Stefano for Daniel. Think about that.’ She retreated into the safety of the main office before I could get at her.

  It was complete nonsense, I thought indignantly, which was why, during the course of what turned out to be a very long telephone conversation indeed with Liv, I just didn’t happen to mention Emma’s outrageous suggestion. I mean, there’s no point repeating rubbish, is there? Liv took a far more phlegmatic view of Stefano’s threat than Emma did, saying she doubted he represented much of a danger to me apart from acute nuisance value. ‘It’s not as if Cressida’s run off with you, is it? Then you’d really need your tin helmet. Men like him don’t persecute women. Instead he’s going to be feeling sorry for you - which’ll really get up your nose - because you’ve been hoodwinked into helping your lover while he was planning all the time to go off with someone else—’

  ‘He’s not my lover,’ I interrupted. That little story was running a lot too far in my opinion. And I still hadn’t made up my mind if what infuriated me most of all was that there was no truth in it. ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. I’m going out with Daniel, not James.’

  ‘Fidelity can be a real bind at times, can’t it?’ said Liv with suspicious sympathy. ‘Still I suppose it’s worth it to be able to look Daniel in the eye and swear James never laid so much as a finger on you.’

  I had a sudden vision of Stefano pointing out, with a completely straight face, that I had a piece of box hedge in my hair. Thank God we aren’t in the age of video phones. Liv would never have let my scarlet face go by without commenting. ‘Daniel trusts me,’ I said loftily.

  She laughed. ‘Enough for you to tell him that you shared a room with James?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I admitted.

  ‘Thought not!’ she said triumphantly. ‘What does he think about all this?’

  ‘I haven’t told him,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘You know what Daniel’s like. It would only upset him and he’s on a really good roll with his writing at the moment. I don’t want to do anything that might disrupt it. And of course he’d feel bound to try and help me.’ Liv snorted in a way that threatened to put a severe strain on our friendship. ‘Besides it’ll only make Stefano even more suspicious if I involve Daniel now. You see, I told him Daniel and I weren’t going out any more.’

  To my relief she accepted this excuse, and we moved on to a series of highly pleasurable speculations about what Cressida could be up to if she hadn’t done a runner with James, until the tap of heels coming up the stairs reminded me that Darian was unlikely to regard emo­tional upset and the need to get it off my chest as a valid excuse for not starting her press release. I can work speedily if necessary. I had half a paragraph done by the time she strode over to my desk to check on my progress. She said it was complete rubbish, but then she always says that on principle about first drafts.

  Later on that evening I was sitting in Lovatt and Barnes, Fine Antiques (Barnes sold out his share long ago), literally swinging my legs and looking impatiently at my watch, wondering if James would come back before locking up time. Neither of his current staff had met me before so I could hardly ask them to let me wait in his office and he hadn’t replied to any of my increasingly urgent calls to his message service to meet me here. A niggling little voice was suggesting that his silence might mean something after all. But at least there were no Battersea ware or Chelsea boxes on sale in the crowded display cabinets. I’d looked. I got up from my chair and wandered around, breathing in pleasurably. The smell, a mixture of antique wax polish, dust and an indefinable hint of pure age, reminded me of that wonderful feeling when after a summer spent working here I realised I had enough money for the first time in my life to buy the clothes I wanted, rather than the ones my mother or Imogen thought suited me. Sabrina, fresh from a stint behind the front desk at Sotheby’s, winced slightly as I ran my fingers down the outside of a large Wedgwood vase, and I smiled at her to indicate I wasn’t a Goth and knew what I was doing.

  I had flaked off all my nail varnish and was contemplat­ing taking up nail biting again when James finally arrived just before the security grille went down. He walked in, shaking raindrops off his hair, and said cheerily, ‘Hello, Laura. What’s all the panic about? Sorry I didn’t ring back, but I’ve been in Cheshire at a sale and good boys don’t use their mobiles while driving down the M6. You two go home, I’ll do the locking up. Come into the office, it’s more comfortable and we can have a drink while you tell me what’s up.’

  Was even James capable of such a masterly assumption of ignorance about why I might want to see him if he really had Cressida hidden away some­where?

  ‘Sit down,’ he said as we entered his office. He was not a believer in the maxim that a tidy desk means a tidy mind. Files and pieces of paper lay heaped all over it; Post-it notes were stuck to the screen of his computer, presumably the only place you could be sure they wouldn’t get buried; a stack of empty picture frames in various states of disrepair leant against one wall and a pile of Sotheby’s Reviews of the Year dating back to the mid-seventies was tilting precariously towards another. He lobbed his jacket in the approximate direction of a chair and, without bothering to wait and see if it hit anything, went into the little kitchen behind the office and came back with a ready opened bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.

  He handed me one and settled himself comfortably in a battered leather director’s chair that had seen better days. ‘What’s up?’ he asked casually.

  I eyed him, wondering what the best approach was for what might be a somewhat delicate subject. In the end I decided directness was the answer. ‘Where’s Cressida?’

  James nearly choked on his drink. ‘Cressy?’ he said with what looked like genuine surprise. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Why should I?’

  I felt something tight inside me relax in relief. ‘Because she’s left Stefano, and he’s convinced it’s for you.’

  James jerked upright in his chair so that the wine in his glass slopped around dangerously. ‘It certainly isn’t.’ He took a deep swig and gazed unseeingly towards me. ‘She told me she was thinking of leaving him but I didn’t believe her.’

  ‘She what?’ I stared at him incredulously, wondering how on earth he had managed to keep such a riveting piece of information to himself. OK, so James was very close-mouthed when it suited him, but as his partner in crime, so to speak, I reckoned he’d owed it to me to share the news. He might have known it would reverberate on us eventually.

  He shrugged, looking embarrassed. ‘When we were at Hurstwood she was telling me she wasn’t happy - said that Stefano doesn’t respect her, she hates living in Ital
y and loathes his family who make her feel she’s nothing like as good as his first wife and certainly not good enough for Stefano. You know the sort of thing.’ I could just imagine. And naturally he hadn’t had the common sense to tell Cressida she had a simply splendid husband, to hold on to him with both hands, and that everything would work out in time. ‘Cressy’s always lived life in high alt so I didn’t know whether to take it seriously or not. She rang last week, left a message on the answerphone saying that Stefano was making unreason­able demands-’

  ‘What sort of demands?’ I interrupted in fascination.

  ‘Haven’t the faintest idea, she didn’t say,’ he said, looking at his feet in a slightly self-conscious fashion, as if his mind too had been running amok with wild specula­tion. ‘She said she couldn’t live with him any longer and wanted to come and see me.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, to discuss what she should do with her future, I imagine.’

  ‘She did?’ I murmured. I couldn’t conceive of approaching any of my former boyfriends to ask for advice as to what I should do next. With at least one of them the advice would run along the lines of ‘find the nearest lake and...’

  ‘Of course I rang back as soon as I got the message but her housekeeper said she’d just left to spend the weekend with her sister and would be back on Monday. I reckoned that whatever Cressy had been rowing with Stefano about hadn’t proved to be so marriage-shattering after all and everything was back to normal. I haven’t spoken to her since.’ He made a face. ‘Frankly, whatever my feelings about the man, I didn’t want to be directly involved in the breakup of Cressy’s marriage.’ But that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t pleased about the out­come. ‘So whatever Stefano may think, I’m not the one responsible.’ His eyes glinted. ‘You needn’t worry, dear heart, I haven’t been unfaithful to you.’

  ‘I wasn’t worrying,’ I said tartly. He made a grimace of mock distress and reached over to refill my glass. ‘It’s worse than that, James,’ I said, and told him the full story of my meeting with Stefano - was it really only that morning? It seemed I had been sick with fear for aeons longer than that.