by Angela Arney
‘To us,’ shouted Raul, equally angry. ‘Why the hell did she keep quiet all these years? I admit being into a lot of things, but incest is not one of them! Liana forced me into that.’
‘If you hadn’t deserted her when she was pregnant, you would have known your own daughter.’ Peter was angry, too, angry at Raul, angry with Eleanora. Why couldn’t they see it was an accident of fate? Why couldn’t they stop thinking of themselves and think about Liana and Nicholas whose lives had just disintegrated, piece by piece, with every word she had spoken?
‘I didn’t know she was bloody well pregnant.’
‘And would it have made any difference if you had?’ Nicholas asked, his quiet voice contrasting with the raised tones of the others.
‘I doubt it,’ Peter answered for Raul. Everyone at the table looked at him. He was working himself up into a towering rage, something totally out of character for Peter. ‘Everyone in the entertainment world knows of Raul Levi’s reputation,’ he said passionately. ‘He is a ruthless womanizer, a ruthless manipulator, a man who has only one real interest in life, himself. I doubt that he was so very different in nineteen forty-four. Poor Liana, how well he took her in. Young, unhappy, vulnerable, she was easy prey for a man like Raul Levi to use and then discard when it suited him.’ He leaned forward across the table, fist clenched in anger. Instinctively Raul moved back, afraid that Peter intended to smash the fist into his face. But he had no such intention. ‘This is purely academic now that so many years have elapsed,’ said Peter. ‘But why did you not return to Liana on that day in March? And why the different name?’
Raul hesitated then shrugged his shoulders. What was the point of getting angry? What was done was done. He glanced down at the weeping Eleanora. Pity about her. He had gained a daughter, the last bloody thing he had ever wanted, and lost a lover! Monika would be surprised when he told her. Having got over the initial shock of the knowledge that he had been sleeping with his own daughter, Raul was no longer appalled. His complacency had been jolted badly, but that was all. And although he hated acknowledging it, he had known in some mysterious way that Eleanora had been lost to him from the moment Broadacres had come into view. Bloody ironic, he thought savagely, her hysterical weeping beginning to annoy him. She feels so much part of all this but she doesn’t belong at all. Her bloodline doesn’t make her one of this snotty-nosed aristocratic crowd, even if she does behave like one! Suddenly he longed for the earthiness of Monika Muller. They were two of a kind, and he knew where he stood with her. The sooner he left this damn place the better.
‘Why did I not go back? Because I met Gustavo Simionato in a pavement café in Naples,’ he said baldly, ‘and he offered me a job on condition that I went with him that day to Sicily.’
‘So you went?’ said Nicholas with damning accusation.
‘Of course I bloody well went.’ Raul’s full mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘Why not? I had my career to think of.’
‘And left a nineteen-year-old girl alone, in wartime, to fend for herself.’
‘Christ almighty! She’d been fending all right for herself before I met her. She did very well as a prostitute, and now I hear that she had money and jewels hidden away, much more money than she ever let me know about. Oh, she could fend for herself all right. Or have you forgotten where her dowry came from? Jesus Christ! What a hypocrite you are.’
‘Don’t blaspheme at my dinner table,’ snapped Lady Margaret leaning across and glowering at Raul, ‘and answer Peter’s other question. Why did you change your name?’
‘I didn’t change it. I just never told Liana my real name. I used my mother’s name, Carducci. She was Italian, and my father Jewish. It wasn’t good to have a Jewish name in nineteen forty-three – there was still plenty of anti-Semitism in Italy – so I played safe and used the name Carducci.’
‘A prostitute,’ wailed Eleanora loudly, ignoring Raul. ‘My own mother a prostitute. How disgusting, how immoral. How could she? Oh, God, a prostitute!’
‘Only because she had to be,’ rapped Nicholas. ‘Just you remember that, my girl, and for God’s sake stop that weeping and wailing. You’re giving me a headache.’ Eleanora’s sobbing subsided to a snuffle. ‘Yes, a prostitute,’ said Nicholas quietly. ‘Difficult for you to understand, but then you’ve never known what it is to starve. And I do mean really starve. It was terrible in Naples in the last years of the war. We, the soldiers, had our rations brought on ships from England and America, but the Italians had nothing. Everything had been destroyed, their crops, their animals. People were reduced to eating earthworms and nettles if they were lucky enough to find them, and they boiled empty shells from the beach just to make fishy-tasting water, which they called soup! Your mother didn’t sell her body from choice; she didn’t even do it for herself; she did it to try to save her friend. But you, you,’ his voice filled with scorn, ‘you, who have never known what it is to want for anything, anything! You chose to be immoral. So don’t flaunt your sanctimonious values in front of me, pretending to be better than your mother. You will never be half the woman she is. No-one forced you to live with Raul Levi,’ Nicholas couldn’t bring himself to say ‘your father’. ‘No, you chose to do it, out of your own free will. So don’t condemn your mother for lack of morals, when your own appear to be non-existent!’
Eleanora gasped. ‘How dare you say that to me? Comparing me with her. I don’t know how you can bear to stand up for her after what she has done to you.’ Agitated, she banged her fist on the table. ‘I don’t understand how anyone could . . .’
‘Eleanora! Be quiet.’ For once Lady Margaret’s voice rang with unaccustomed authority. She struggled painfully to her feet, her knobbly, arthritic hands pushing back her chair with difficulty. Hastily rising, Richard Chapman hurried round, helped ease the chair back, and, fetching her sticks from where they rested against the wall, handed them to her. ‘Thank you, Richard.’
‘Oh, Margaret.’ Richard’s face was stricken with a mixture of bewilderment and sorrow. ‘What can we say? What can we do?’
‘Say? Do?’ Margaret snorted with a short, sudden laugh. She turned slowly, taking care to get her balance evenly distributed on her sticks so that her twisted legs and painful feet supported her better. ‘Say? Do?’ she repeated in ringing tones. ‘Before anyone says or does anything more, I would advise you to remember the words of our Lord, as told in the gospel of St John. “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.”’
‘Well said, Margaret,’ whispered Dorothy, her eyes shining with unshed tears. ‘Come, Donald, we’ll go with Margaret. These young people have a lot of thinking and talking to do.’
The remaining occupants of the room sat mute, watching the three old people depart. Lady Margaret’s words left an uncomfortable echo.
*
‘Grandmother is right.’ Eleanora spoke first, her voice muffled now by ragged sobs, low and hesitant as she struggled to come to terms with cognizance of the unacceptable facets of her own character. ‘Who am I to judge her? It’s quite true, I haven’t got too much to be proud of.’ Turning, she looked at Raul, aware of the scales falling from her eyes and with them the power of his superficial charm; now she saw him clearly. She knew, too, that she was looking at him for the last time. ‘Neither of us have much to be proud of, have we?’ she said with painful but forthright honesty, heedless that Nicholas, Peter and his parents were listening. ‘Our affair was based on one thing, and one thing only, lust. And even if you were not my father it still wouldn’t have been right. Lust is no substitute for love.’
‘Christ!’ Raul smashed both fists angrily down on the table, rattling the delicate coffee cups in their saucers. ‘For God’s sake stop being so damned self-righteous. It’s not my fault I’m your damned father. And stop going on about lust! love! What the hell is the difference?’
‘If you don’t know now, then you never will,’ said Peter.
‘Shut up,’ snarled Raul, a raw line of colour slashing his c
heeks as his rage built up. ‘There is only one goddamned thing that concerns me, and that is I find I’ve been sleeping with my own bloody daughter! I don’t like that. As I said before, I’m not into incest. But just get this straight. It isn’t my fault it happened. None of this is my fault. It’s Liana’s fault for bringing Eleanora up as the daughter of another man.’
He looked at Eleanora and saw the mixture of fear and dislike in her eyes. For a second, just a few split seconds, it flashed across his mind how different it might have been if he had been a different kind of man. A different man might have questioned the attraction he had instinctively felt for Eleanora. A different man might have felt a paternal affection towards a talented young girl. A different man would not have walked out on Liana. But he was Raul Levi, a man who had always regarded every woman as a sexual object, and because of that the attraction had irrevocably drawn him into a sexual relationship. Self-gratification, the basis of his life, had destroyed any chance there might have been of ever knowing his daughter as a daughter.
But the moment came and went in the time it took to draw a breath, and Raul banished it from his mind. He did not believe in wasting time on what might have been, only on what was. ‘I’m going,’ he said harshly. ‘I shall never see any of you again.’ He turned towards Eleanora. ‘Especially you. You are not, never have been and never will be my daughter. I want to forget that any of this ever happened.’
With three swift strides he was at the door, but Nicholas was there before him. ‘The story,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do with the story?’
Raul gave a short laugh. ‘What the hell do you think? I’m going to burn it, of course. How you sort yourselves out is up to you. But I don’t want my name dragged into the headlines for a bloody story. Professionally, things are going well for me, and that is exactly the way I intend to keep it.’ He opened the door then paused and said, ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Originally I wrote that story thinking to exorcise ghosts of the past. And all I’ve succeeded in doing is creating a whole lot more!’
Nicholas looked at him. He could see quite clearly the shadow of a loss which Raul was incapable of seeing. Perhaps one day, he thought, in years to come, when he is an old man, Raul will realize that when he denied his daughter, he lost more than anyone here tonight. Nicholas knew from experience that broken pieces could in some miraculous way be stuck together. It would take time, but somehow he and the family would do it, and they would be whole again one day and that would include Eleanora. Whereas Raul would be alone with his ghosts.
‘We are all haunted by the past,’ he said. To Raul’s surprise his voice was gentle. ‘And we can never undo what has been done. Only learn to live with it.’ He was thinking of the tangled web of deceit they had spun between them, he and Liana, ending in the death of James and the destruction of Eleanora’s world as she had always known it.
Raul, knowing nothing of this, did not understand and wanted nothing from Nicholas. Least of all his pity. ‘I shall not be haunted,’ he said abruptly and opened the door to leave.
‘Before you go,’ Nicholas suddenly became very businesslike. ‘I would like you to sign a document to the effect that you will never reveal the story my wife told us tonight; and that you will never publish any part of the story you wrote or anything else that you might know appertaining to any of the characters involved. Also I would like delivered into my hands all copies of the story, The Two Girls.’
Raul shrugged. ‘I’ll sign whatever you want if it will keep you happy.’
‘It will,’ said Nicholas. ‘And the story?’
‘There are only two copies, one of which I understand is here. The other I will send to you.’
Nicholas turned to Peter. ‘Will you go with Raul to my study and draft a statement? I know I can trust you to make sure it’s watertight.’ He nodded towards Eleanora, who had left the table and was now standing staring out of the window into the darkness. ‘I want to speak with Eleanora alone.’
Peter glanced across at Eleanora. Her shoulders were hunched with unhappiness. She looked so young – a child again, a small, bewildered, lost child. Liana’s story had cast her adrift, broken all the ties of security she knew and loved. The vulnerability which Peter knew had always been there under the surface, just beneath her impetuous, bubbling vivacity, was now etched in every line of her body. He smiled sadly at Nicholas. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She needs you.’
He could not help wishing that she needed him, but knew it was not yet his time. She had to come to terms with the new knowledge of herself. And more importantly, come to terms with the knowledge of who her real father was and what he had been to her. That would be difficult. He could almost feel her pain and revulsion from the tense lines of her body. I must be patient, Peter told himself. I must wait and help her when, and if, she asks for it. My time will come again eventually. But now she needs Nicholas to allay her fears and provide an anchor from which to fix her life once more. He followed Raul out of the room.
‘We’ll go, too.’ Richard Chapman shepherded his wife Anne towards the door.
Anne hesitated. She wanted to say something comforting to Eleanora but everything she had heard, everything which had happened, was so far outside her range of experience, she was still finding it difficult to comprehend. Her own life was well ordered. She was not given to impulses, and imagination was not her strong point. But Eleanora’s desperate unhappiness now and Liana’s harrowing story earlier in the evening had upset her ordered world. It was that fact which touched her most. Order meant security, and security to Anne meant happiness. When she had fled from Broadacres, she had found the security and happiness she had needed with Richard Chapman. Now she wished it was within her power to endow Eleanora with a similar happiness.
Crossing to Eleanora she touched her arm. ‘Don’t worry too much, my dear. The time will come when you will be able to look back on tonight without pain or recrimination. Life works out in some very strange ways.’
‘And none stranger than mine,’ said Eleanora with a sad, wry smile.
‘Oh, my poor darling, I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t.’ For once Anne threw caution to the winds and grabbed hold of Eleanora, hugging her tightly. ‘I meant that one day you will be happy again, and all of this will seem unimportant. It will, it will, I promise.’
Eleanora hugged her back, grateful for the unexpected show of affection. ‘Thank you, Anne,’ she said. ‘I can only hope you are right.’
‘I am,’ said Anne firmly. Richard was at the door, signalling frantically with his eyebrows that they should leave. She gave Eleanora a quick kiss on the cheek and followed him from the room.
Eleanora turned to Nicholas. She felt stiff and awkward, as if he were a stranger. ‘People are surprising,’ she said at last. ‘Anne was the last person I thought would forgive my behaviour. I know what strict moral views she has, and I’ve hardly been a model young woman. I should think she must be very glad that Peter and I are finished.’
Nicholas ignored the remark about Peter. He wondered if, in all the chaos, anyone besides himself had realized the obvious. There was absolutely no impediment whatsoever now to Eleanora and Peter marrying if they wanted to, because they were not related in any way. Of course, Peter must have realized it, but in the aftermath of confusion, while everyone’s minds were still occupied with Liana’s astounding revelations, no-one else appeared to have even thought of it, least of all Eleanora. But that could be sorted out later. First of all, Nicholas wanted mother and daughter reconciled, reunited and able to look into each other’s faces without bitterness or memories of the past standing in their way.
‘I’m glad you think your grandmother was right,’ he said quietly. ‘And you must know that what she has learned tonight will not change her love for your mother. She and Liana became close friends before you were born, and nothing can shake the foundations of that. I’d like to think that in time you, too, will have some understanding.’
‘She deceived you fo
r me, her unborn child,’ said Eleanora. ‘I know that. I knew it even when I was screaming at her.’ There was a long silence, then Eleanora said slowly. ‘Tell me some more about what it was like in Italy when you first met Mummy.’
Nicholas was glad to oblige. He had wondered what he was going to say to Eleanora, how to comfort her. Talking about, and adding to the already graphic story Liana had told, helped him, too. When at last he had finished he said, almost to himself. ‘But she was wrong about one thing. She didn’t make me fall in love with her. I was a very, very willing suitor.’
He smiled at Eleanora. ‘You may find it difficult to understand, but I think I fell in love with your mother the year before, when we first met so briefly in autumn nineteen forty-three. Yes, that was when I fell in love, on that October night, when Charlie Parsons and I pulled her from the bombed tenement building. Although like you, when I was young I had difficulty in differentiating between love and lust.’ Eleanora flushed, but Nicholas, lost in his own thoughts, continued. ‘I thought then that I wanted her physically because she was so beautiful, but now I know it was far more than that. The memory of her face never left me, and when she turned up in my office six months later, I knew I didn’t want to let her go. I did look for Raul, but I must admit that for my own selfish reasons, I always hoped we would never find him. I always sensed that if we did, I’d lose her again. As you now know, we never did find Raul, and I married Liana.’
‘Oh, Daddy, you really do love her, don’t you? You don’t blame her, even though she . . .’ Suddenly Eleanora gasped, put her hand to her mouth and burst into tears. ‘Daddy, oh God, I forgot! I can’t say that any more, can I?’
Gently, Nicholas took her hand in his. She trembles like a frightened bird, he thought tenderly. ‘Look at me, Eleanora,’ he said. She looked and saw a face glowing with warmth and the eyes of a compassionate, loving father. Her noisy tears quietened into soft crying. ‘I am your father. I always have been and always will be. The ties of blood are not as strong as the ties of true love. Always remember that, Eleanora, and never doubt me, whatever people may say, now, or in the future.’