“I came to talk to you and I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d done that. You’d disappeared on me once before and I was determined you wouldn’t this time. Though the fire was a pretty good diversion, I’ll give you that.” He gave a ghost of a grin.
She tried to smile back, hardly recognising the feeling as her lips moved. She was about to speak again when a noise at the door made them both look around. It was her brother.
“You’re awake,” Nick said. “Oh, Maura, you’ve had us worried.”
She saw wide smiles pass between Nick and Dominic and noticed an easy familiarity between them. “Have you two met each other?” she said, struggling to be polite.
Nick laughed. “Met each other? We’ve been practically living together in the hospital, haven’t we, Dom?”
Dom? Maura looked up in surprise.
“Dom wouldn’t leave your bedside,” Nick went on, fully aware of the impact of what he was saying. “We had to prise him away to make sure he got some sleep himself. It was only when the doctors said you were on the mend and that you’d gone from concussion to a deep sleep that he would even go outside.”
Maura wanted to close her eyes and open them again to see if this strange scene would go away. She tried it but nothing changed. Instead, there was another noise at the door, and they all turned to see a nurse come in, carrying some medication. She smiled over at Maura. “Welcome back, Maura.”
Maura tried to smile back, completely bewildered now. She felt herself spinning a little. As she did, she heard Gemma’s voice from the corridor. It was all too much, too quickly.
She fell back into the quiet comfort of sleep.
A nurse’s cool hand on her wrist woke her the next time. The room was blessedly dark, and she saw by a tiny clock on her bedside that it was eight o’clock.
“Is it morning or night-time?” she whispered to the young woman standing beside her bed.
“It’s Wednesday night-time,” the nurse whispered back. “You’ve had another good long sleep. I think perhaps you overdid it with the visitors this afternoon. Maybe take in single ones rather than coach-loads for the first few days, hey?” she smiled down at her.
Maura felt much better, the peace and darkness of the room calming her. She read the nurse’s name badge. Jenny. “Jenny, what’s happened to me, am I all right?”
“Only the doctors are supposed to tell you that but I’ll let you in on a secret – you’re going to be absolutely fine.”
“But my arm, my head? Will I be scarred?” she asked anxiously.
“Hardly at all. You picked the best place in the world to have an accident like that – you were surrounded by fire-fighters who knew their first aid and knew exactly what to do. They put cold water on the burn on your arm straight away, stopped your head wound from bleeding, and called an ambulance. Your hair was the worst casualty. The doctors had no choice, it was singed so badly and they needed to check the cut on your head. I’ve heard your friend Gemma stood over them like a fashion consultant while they cut it – you would have been proud of her.” The nurse grinned down at her.
Maura asked the nurse if she could see the damage for herself and was handed a mirror. Apart from some bruises on her cheek, she didn’t look too different. That’s if she ignored the spiky crop of hair where her long curls used to be.
The nurse watched her closely. “I don’t know what your hair was like before, but that elfin look really suits you.”
Right now Maura didn’t really care about her hair. There were other more urgent matters to think about. She glanced at the door.
The nurse seemed to read her mind. “Your Irish guardian angel is just outside,” she gestured to the corridor, “if that’s who you’re looking for. He’s never been far away.”
“Would it be all right if I spoke to him? And would it be all right if he was my only visitor for a little while?” she asked softly.
The nurse finished her temperature and pulse checks and nodded. “Of course it would be. I’ll put up a Do Not Disturb sign. Just don’t get too excited, okay?” she added as she left the room.
Maura gave a weak smile. Concussion or not, it was time to sort things out between them.
There was a faint knock at the door, then Dominic was in the room again with her. There was a long moment when neither of them spoke. She looked closely at him.
Dominic spoke first. “You’re back with us, aren’t you? I can see some of that fight back in your eyes. How are you feeling?”
“I’m much better, thank you,” she said, strangely polite. Then she couldn’t wait any longer. “Dominic, why are you still here?”
“I wanted to make sure you were better. If it hadn’t been for our appointment you mightn’t have been at Lorikeet Hill at the time of the fire. I wanted to make sure you recovered.”
She looked away. ‘Our appointment.’ So that was it. He must have an over-developed conscience. He’d come to tell her about his love for Carla. And he’d stayed because he felt guilty about her injuries.
“Wrong on all counts.”
She looked back at him in surprise.
“You really are going to have to stop speaking your thoughts aloud,” he said with a wide grin. “You’ll never make a high-powered businesswoman at this rate – you’ll give away your secrets at every meeting.”
She was confused again and this time she definitely knew the concussion wasn’t to blame.
“So why are you here then?” she spoke now, looking closely in his eyes for clues.
“I had to tell you something and see if you had anything to say back to me. I hope you have. I think you do.”
Now he was talking in strange rhymes and riddles. This time her face showed her thoughts.
“Ah, Maura, I’m sorry, I’m going too fast. I need to start at the beginning. I want to tell you all about Carla, tell you the whole story,” Dominic answered, suddenly deadly serious. “Are you up for talking now, are you not too tired?” His voice was concerned.
She shook her head. “I’m fine, please, tell me.”
He moved closer, and sat in the chair close to her bed. “I wanted to tell you about Carla that night in London. Even before that. But I owed her some loyalty and I didn’t quite believe what I was feeling for you. I couldn’t decide if you felt something for me or if you loathed me. It was like a storm in my head. Sometimes it made me want to tell you everything, so you’d think better of me. But at other times I was happy for you to think the worst, because you seemed to think so badly of me anyway.”
“What is there between you and Carla?” Maura whispered, trying to take in everything Dominic was saying and distracted by the gentle touch of his hand on her face.
“There’s nothing between us,” he said firmly. “There never has been, no matter what you’ve heard.” He sat up suddenly, putting a small space between them. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.
“Maura, Carla has a serious eating disorder. She’s a very sick woman.”
Maura looked up at him in shock.
“She started starving herself when she was just a teenager, trying to get into modelling. But she thought she wasn’t getting thin quickly enough, so she started using diet pills and diuretics and laxative tablets – you name it, she tried it.”
Dominic was looking down at her hand, his fingers lightly stroking it, as he continued his story.
“It could be worse, I guess. Her best friend in New York moved on to speed, and then on to heroin. I know Carla tried it once or twice, she said everyone did it. That was when Carla’s father asked me to help her. He’d been doing all he could, then he found out he was dying. He was more worried about her than himself. I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to say no. He was more than a boss to me. I promised him I’d help her get better and to keep her – and her friends – away from her inheritance, until she got a grip on her life again.”
Maura started to ask a question but then sank back into her pillow again. She wanted to hear everything from Dominic fi
rst.
He noticed her movement. “I can guess what you probably heard. That I had conned her father? That I’d been bribed to be with her?”
Maura nodded.
He smiled grimly. “They were all lies. There was never any money in it for me. There were worse stories too. When I cut off her money-flow to keep her junkie friends away, they spread rumours that I was the main dealer in town. That I was trying to get Carla addicted as a way of moving in on her money.”
A nerve in his jaw twitched. Maura remained silent.
“We started travelling a lot, half for my business, half to keep her away from her friends and keep her on treatment. She came to Australia with me twice. There’s a clinic in Sydney that’s had good success with eating disorders. But she wouldn’t stay there. She wouldn’t stick to any treatment.
“So I brought her back to Ireland this year, to a clinic just outside Dublin. It’s one of the best in the world. But she kept skipping appointments or storming out mid-session. Sometimes she’d go missing for a few hours or even a day or two.”
Maura thought back to Carla’s sudden arrival by taxi to Mayo. And the urgent phone messages Dominic kept getting during their trip together. It was all falling into place. She looked closely at Dominic, trying to imagine what he had been through.
He looked steadily back at her. “So I made a deal with her. I would set up Ardmahon House in Clare as a temporary clinic. Eithne, the woman I was showing around that day during your class, was going to run the treatment programme in the house.”
“So she’s there now?” Maura asked in a quiet voice.
Dominic shook his head. “Her overdose that night made us realise it was much more serious than we thought. It’s gone beyond an eating disorder. She’s done serious damage to her kidneys and her heart. She’s back in New York, in a private clinic. The doctors have told me she’s become too dependent on me, that all the dramas are part of the illness. She knows it’s up to her now. She’s the only one who can drag herself out of it and it’s going to be a long, slow process, years probably. I’ve had to tell her all that.”
Maura took a quick breath, thinking with shame of the remarks she’d made to Bernadette about Carla and food. She remembered hearing Carla being sick in the bathroom at Ardmahon House, after she had eaten the desserts. She guessed now that Carla had taken something to make herself throw up.
She couldn’t be silent any longer. She needed to know everything. “But what about that night in Ardmahon House?” Her voice shook as she recalled the evening. “I saw you in bed with her. You were both naked,” she whispered.
His hand gently touched her cheek again. “Your face that night has haunted me. I tried to explain but you wouldn’t let me.”
Maura remembered how she had felt, leaning against the door while Dominic pleaded to talk to her. And then he had been gone the next morning.
Dominic looked searchingly into her eyes. “Carla was naked, Maura, I wasn’t. And it absolutely wasn’t what you thought it was.”
He took a deep breath. His expression told her the memory of that night caused him pain as well. “After that scene in the restaurant, her friends stormed off, back to Galway or Dublin or wherever they’d arrived from. I wouldn’t let her go. The mood she was in, I didn’t trust either them or her. She calmed down enough to decide she’d take a bath, then go to bed. A separate room. It always was,” he added, looking solemnly at Maura. She believed him.
“She’d been in the bathroom for nearly an hour and then she wouldn’t answer me when I called her. It took nearly five minutes to get the door open. She was lying in the bath, nearly unconscious. I thought at first she was dead.”
Dominic answered her unspoken question.
“She’d swallowed some pills, Valium or Prozac or a bit of everything, I never found out exactly what. I pulled her out of the bath, and she suddenly came to and was violently sick over the both of us. I’d just called the ambulance, lain her on the bed and taken my wet shirt off, when you walked in.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I stayed with her until the ambulance officers arrived, then ran to talk to you. When I came back, she’d tricked the ambulance woman into letting her use the bathroom and had tried to take another handful of pills. That’s when it got really serious. She was rushed to Ennis hospital, then to Dublin by helicopter. I went with her, and that’s why I was gone the next morning.
“I rang you but I kept getting the answering machine. Carla was conscious again by that stage, so I drove back to Ardmahon House to see you, hoping it wasn’t too late. It was late Sunday afternoon by the time I arrived.”
Maura thought back. By that time she had heard the news about Quinn and was on her way back to Australia.
“I met Bernadette just as she was coming back from dropping you at Shannon Airport. She explained everything that had happened. I felt terrible for you and your family and I couldn’t call you then, I had to wait. So Bernadette and I stayed up all night talking. That’s when I decided to come to Australia to find you again, to talk to you. I flew to New York, to finalise the clinic arrangements for Carla, then flew on to Adelaide. The Awards judging gave me the perfect excuse to arrive unannounced. I just wanted to get here, to see you.”
Maura struggled to sit up, grimacing as the burnt skin on her arm stretched. “Did you tell Carla . . .” Maura searched for the words.
“Tell her about us?” he helped her.
She nodded.
“I rang her straight after I’d said goodbye to you at the airport in London, after our night together.” His hand was gently stroking her left arm. She felt a slow ripple of feeling flicker through her body. Dominic continued his explanation. “She had already guessed
something was happening between you and me. She reacted badly. Not from jealousy – I think she realised that if I wasn’t always around then she’d have no choice but to stand on her own two feet. It was time for her to make the decision and she was furious. That’s why she tried that food-poisoning trick, to make a fuss and keep you away from me. It was a terrible night. All I wanted was to be with you.”
He took a ragged breath. “I wrote you a letter a million times in my head, but I couldn’t get the words right. There was too much to be said. And it was all still new between us. I wanted to touch you again, to hold you, not explain how I felt on a scrap of paper. And I worried that you wouldn’t read it anyway, not after what you thought you had seen.”
She agreed silently. She probably wouldn’t have read it, would have torn it up there and then.
Dominic moved closer to her. “I’ve had four days of sitting here, rehearsing what I want to say to you and imagining your answer. I’ve gone through every single possibility. Sometimes you say exactly what I want you to say, sometimes you speak your mind. I love you for both those things, so I can hardly complain, can I?” He laughed softly, as he gently stroked her hand again.
She felt a stirring of excitement as she tried to keep up with his words. “What did you say, Dominic?”
“I said I’ve gone through every possibility . . .”
She interrupted. “Not that bit, the end bit.”
He frowned, obviously trying to recall his words. “I said I can hardly complain if you speak your own mind . . .”
Maura was almost climbing from the bed in her impatience. “No, the other bit.”
Realisation dawned on his face. “Oh yes, the bit where I said I love you. That’s the bit I came here to say.” His voice softened. “I meant to be much more romantic, not just blurt it out in mid-conversation like that. But I haven’t had much practice at these things,” he said. “Let me try again. I’m in love with you, Maura. That night in London I asked you to trust me, but I knew I had to earn it. I’ll spend all the years in the world earning that trust if I need to.”
As he noticed a smile start to appear on her lips, he visibly started to relax. Then to her surprise, his whole tone of voice suddenly changed and became businesslike.
“
I’ve had an idea, a great idea for a new food magazine and I know for certain that an international magazine publisher is right behind it.” He smiled. “A monthly series, tracing the food from different countries and their impact on the rest of the world. You know, Irish food in America, Indian food in Britain, Asian food in Australia. Not a food glamour magazine, more like cultural history, with recipes thrown in, to widen the appeal.”
Dominic appeared oblivious to her look of surprise. It was identical to the idea she had discussed with Bernadette. He was continuing his spiel, fighting a smile that kept crossing his lips. “All I need now is a bright, clever chef who can also write and talk about food . . . and would travel all around the world with me if I asked her to. A bright, clever chef who could travel safe in the knowledge that her friend Gemma was extremely keen to settle in Clare and run the very successful Lorikeet Hill Winery Café.”
“How do you know that? How do you know all these things?” Maura was taken aback.
“There’s been a lot of very interesting conversations in the hospital waiting-room these past few days,” he smiled. “I’ve learnt a lot of things, especially about a brave, beautiful, spirited woman called Maura.”
His hand found hers on the bed. “Can I ask you four questions?”
She nodded.
“Will you travel the world with me?”
She nodded.
“Will you work on the magazine with me?”
She nodded.
“Could you love me?”
She nodded.
“Will you think about marrying me?”
She grinned and nodded her head, once, very firmly. His arms came around her, unfortunately dragging her bandaged arm against the bedcover. She winced as a shot of pain went up her arm.
Dominic tried again, attempting to hold her close but only getting tangled in the drip tubes suspended from the stand next to her bed. He extricated himself. “That will just have to wait,” he said, trying not to laugh. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small velvet box. “This is for you,” he said.
A Taste for It Page 31