'What was he after?' Bruce demanded. 'Some way to get back at Angelica, and you, Jorja, the weapon he used?'
She couldn't look at Bruce, for the answer to his question was there in her eyes and there was no hiding it.
'Damn him to blazes,' Bruce muttered, for his former tone of voice had turned a couple of heads at a nearby table. 'I knew he could slam the gates of mercy if it suited him, but it's unforgivable of him not to give a damn for your feelings. Surely he can see that you have feelings Angelica hasn't even heard about?'
'Our feelings aren't always selective, are they?' She sipped her port, and her body at least had lost that chill which had set in ever since the evening of the Contessa's death. That was when Renzo had withdrawn from her; that was when he had stayed the night long in his mother's room, so that not until the morning had the men from the funeral parlour been allowed to remove her body from Hanson Square.
Unshaven, far from everyone in his thoughts, Renzo had walked in the garden alone. Then later, shaved and groomed again, he had come to her and told her of his decision to have his mother interred in an English cemetery. Argument had been hopeless. He had brushed it away as if it were a troublesome fly. 'It's my business,' he told Jorja. 'I don't need to consult you or anybody else.'
It was during their course of Dublin Bay prawns that Bruce asked Jorja a direct question. 'Do you love him?'
Jorja applied butter to brown bread, and was confused by her inability to give him a direct answer. Hurt, yes. Bewildered, and certainly bothered, but only when she was in Renzo's arms and desire had its grip on him, excluding everything but the physical, did she feel any sense of security. When the moment came to release her from his arms, she was on her own again, the link between them fraying at the edges, tearing and letting go as the desire ebbed away. Even his tone of voice would change. Gone, that seductive murmur of a man enthralled by the shape and feel of her.
'He's like Janus,' she said, in a troubled voice. 'He has two faces and I don't know which is the reality.'
'You mean,' Bruce frowned and ran his eyes over her face and hair, both so fair and somehow innocently untouched despite her marriage, 'he has a night face, and a daytime one. It figures! He'd have to be a cold fish if he didn't take advantage of a lovely thing like you!'
'Bruce!' She flushed vividly. 'Please don't ‑'
'By God,' he showed his white teeth, 'I'd give anything to have you saying please do.'
'Bruce ‑'
'Yes,' he leaned forward, holding her distressed eyes, 'I'd like to spoil you like mad, and make you realise just how much a man can care —if he has the right girl to care about. Jorja, you deserve a whole-hearted man, not just his attentions when it's bedtime. All right, I know that sounds crude, but it's the truth, isn't it?'
'I—I don't know how we got around to having this conversation, so can we stop it?' She looked at him defiantly, and found her gaze on his mouth. A good, firm mouth, slightly moist from the big, delicious prawns. No one, not even Renzo, had ever spoken as if she mattered for herself alone. As if she were worth lifting on to the kind of pedestal her sister had always enjoyed, her favours sought with adoring eagerness.
'If we stop now,' Bruce said, 'we may never find another opportunity to begin again.'
'That may be for the best,' she retorted.
'And is it for the best that you go on being the key which Renzo keeps twisting in the locked gates of his heart?'
She winced, for the words conjured up iron resistance to all her tender needs... to see Renzo look at her from across a room, as if not an atom of distance divided them. It could never happen, for when he looked at her, the slim, golden figure of Angelica glided between them... the lovely and insidious serpent in any garden they tried to plant with the seeds of love.
'Perhaps, Bruce, you've lived and worked too long in a world where people walk out on their responsibilities if they don't happen to bring them a constant source of happiness or pleasure. The film world isn't renowned for constancy, is it? It's in the world of reality that people have to come to terms with their lives, and that's what I have to do.'
'You're a sweet-faced fool, Jorja.'
She dabbed her lips with a serviette. 'Those prawns were enjoyable.'
'I'm glad our table-talk hasn't ruined your appetite.'
'Renzo was working on the new music just before—anyway, it sounded beautiful to me. It sounds as if the film is a very romantic one.'
'A romantic drama.' Bruce sat back in his chair and considered her, a half-quizzical gleam in his eyes. 'Thank heaven we managed to get ourselves a real actress for that one, because it happens to be one of the rare women's films made these days. Renzo put up half the money, did you know?'
'Did he really?' Her eyes lit up. 'Then he must have a great deal of faith in the story; he's no one's fool when it comes to hard cash, is he?'
Their empty dishes were whisked away and their main meal was served. As Jorja breathed the aroma of her pot-roasted chicken and watched the fluffy dumplings being added to her plate, she had an irresistible image of the rectory dining-room, with its embossed wallpaper, oak table and high-backed chairs. A homesick feeling swept over her and she decided to telephone her father when she arrived home at Hanson Square. They couldn't go on being distant with each other, for life could end so suddenly, and regrets weren't easy to live with.
'So Monica arrives some time today?' Bruce sliced into his steak.
'Yes. Renzo's going to the airport to pick her up, and I must admit I'm a little bit nervous about meeting her.'
'Naturally enough. There's bound to be a bit of tension, but as I've already advised you, pet, stand back and try to be detached. You aren't, after all, your sister's keeper.'
'But she has been responsible for hurting Monica.'
'Look,' Bruce waved his fork at her, 'don't go turning yourself into a whipping-girl for Monica as well as Renzo. Your sister's damnable sins aren't yours—I doubt if you could commit a sin if you tried, and that's half your trouble.'
'What do you mean, Bruce?' She gave him a startled look across her plate of chicken.
'Martyrs get strewn with ashes not flowers, Jorja. Someone hands them a cross to carry, not a bunch of roses. You're a pretty nice person, but it worries me the way you allow your niceness to be used as a whiplash. You aren't being fair to yourself.'
'I—I can only be the person I am.'
'True, and the person you are deserves to emerge from its cocoon of concern for others and their wretched problems. Live, laugh and be merry; pet, because if you take on the cares and woes of those around you, they'll selfishly assume that it's what you like, what you prefer.'
Jorja ate in silence, absorbing his words. They rang with a truth she couldn't deny, for hadn't her father assumed that she had no need of carefree pleasures and was content to be burdened with a big old house and coping with parishioners who came knocking on the side door, woeful with problems she was expected to solve.
Strangely, she hadn't noticed how much of her time and trouble had been expended on others, so that in looking back she seemed not to remember the dream years between adolescence and becoming an adult. There was no time for experimenting with hairstyles and clothes; no time to dream of a potential lover. Someone had to see to things, or the three of them would have been living in a house of cobwebs, surviving on cheese sandwiches.
'Bruce,' she smiled ruefully, 'it would seem that I'd suit everyone better if I had my sister's ways. You, Renzo—my father.'
'Good lord, I'm not saying that ‑'
'You are, you know.' She drank from her wine glass. 'Be less caring, you're telling me. Live for yourself and let others flounder around in their problems. Angelica does all that, and leads everyone a merry old dance in the process. The femme fatale, whom few men can resist. Well, she was born that way and can't help herself. I was born my way and I can't help it if I have a foolish heart.'
In an almost painful silence Bruce gazed across the table at Jorja, taking in
her air of quiet strength, lightly touched with a humorous acceptance of devils and angels.
'You know what I'd like?' he breathed. 'I'd like to come round to you, grab you in my arms, and never let you set foot in Renzo's house ever again. I've never wanted any girl as madly as I want you, and you've said yourself that he wants Angelica.'
'Oh—you mustn't say such things ‑' There were shadings of distress and a tinge of wonderment in her wide blue eyes. She had missed the fun of flirtation in her formative years, making her realise why she couldn't fully cope with men, even though now she was married to an aloof, complex Latin who could also be breathtakingly passionate.
'Don't you like it?' Bruce stroked his green eyes over her face. 'Doesn't it excite you in the smallest degree that we're together in my favourite restaurant and no one knows we're here, and saying these things to each other? Come, wouldn't you be less than honest if you said no?'
'I—shouldn't be here, Bruce. I should be at home, making sure everything is being prepared for Monica's arrival.'
'Forever duty-bound,' Bruce mocked. 'Forever concerned to put other people's needs before your own. You're unbelievable, do you know that?'
'I might seem so to you.' She laid her knife and fork side by side on her plate. 'You've told me that the women you know are wrapped up in themselves.'
'I haven't known all of them intimately,' he said drily. 'They may have hidden virtues, but at this moment all I see, all I care about is a girl I gave away to another guy. I'd like to twist the arm of fate for doing that to me.'
'We were strangers,' she pointed out. 'Everything was strange to me that day. None of it was tangible and all I knew was that I was saving Daddy from being hurt ‑'
She broke off, but it was too late to bite back her words. She saw the comprehension leap into her companion's eyes. She could see that with a half-sentence she had told Bruce everything.
'So that was it?' He set his jaw grimly. 'Renzo was going to spill the beans relating to your sister's affair with his brother, unless you married him and made it look as if he didn't give a damn. It didn't matter what happened to your pride so long as his didn't suffer—Jorja, how can you stay with a man like that?'
How often she had asked herself such a question, but from the beginning half of her had resisted Renzo while the other half had discovered at Sandbourne that when he touched her, when he laid his warm and coppery body close to hers, she was lost to all reasoning. The answer was that she was in thrall to Renzo in a physical way, and Bruce could only see that outwardly she looked a cool, fair English girl whose lips, whose skin and eyes didn't reveal any of the tumultuous feeling which Renzo could arouse in her.
No matter how passionate the lovemaking, the memories alone were left when it was over; the features of the face and the lines of the body didn't reveal the emotions or the ecstasy. They remained the secret of the senses.
'Do any of us,' she asked, 'do anything that we don't truly want to do? Perhaps in the subterranean passages of our psyche we follow blindly the false lights of our secret desires.'
'Are you saying, Jorja, that you secretly desired your sister's fiancé?'
'Does it seem so impossible?' Her smile wasn't fully realised. 'I was a girl whose world was bounded by rectory walls, and the hills and dales of Duncton. In bed I read of the imperious men inside the books of the Brontes and Jane Austen, and one fine day my beautiful sister walked into the rectory parlour with a man who looked as if he had stepped out of Pride And Prejudice. He wore the most perfect suit, and when he was introduced to me, he kissed my hand.'
She paused and her smile shook slightly at the edge of her mouth. 'Does it seem so strange, Bruce, that I was a fish struggling on his hook even before he landed me?'
'What became of the hook?' Bruce growled. 'Isn't it still sticking in your lovely flesh?'
She quivered, and a ray of sunlight made her hair shimmer. She sat there in silence as their waiter cleared the table and asked if they would like the dessert trolley to be brought to their table.
'I—I don't think I could manage a sweet,' she said. 'My lunch was perfect ‑'
'Take a look at the trolley anyway,' Bruce coaxed. 'The chocolate ice-cream gateau is a marvel; just wait till you see it.'
'All right, you've weakened my resistance,' she smiled, meeting the eyes of this man who had coaxed out of her things she had never meant to say. She felt a stab of compunction. Renzo might not love her, but he trusted her. Everyone had always trusted her.
As Bruce had promised the gateau was marvellous and they both enjoyed a slice of it, followed by coffee. 'What,' Bruce asked, 'are we going to do about us?'
'Nothing,' she said simply. 'We met, we lunched, and on Friday you'll attend the funeral and forget we talked like this.'
'Would that be the way of it—if you didn't have that ring on your finger?' he asked.
Jorja glanced at the ring, its gemmed beauty glinting against her fingers. What, she wondered, would she be feeling if she had met Bruce Clayton while she was still living at home at Duncton? She quite honestly felt that she would have been attracted to him, but doubted if he could ever have been as ruthless as Renzo had been in prising her out of the rectory, which like a shell had grown around her until she couldn't imagine life without it.
'Tell me to my face that you don't enjoy my company,' he persisted.
'I—I enjoy it very much,' she admitted, 'but nothing can change the fact that I'm married to Renzo. I don't live in your kind of a world, Bruce, where people cast off each other as if, like coats, they had lost their warmth. You mustn't make the mistake of thinking that because I look rather like Angelica I think like her, and can behave like her. She suits herself and isn't really aware of other people's feelings.'
'Aren't you aware of mine, Jorja?'
'Oh, I just think you're a little bored and disillusioned by the women you have known.'
'Knowing them has at least shown me what I've been missing.'
'Well, now you know what to look for, a girl from the country who prefers to see fur coats on the rabbits, and the sun sparkling on a stream to the biggest diamond in Bond Street.'
'So you're going to pass up the chance to be the light of my eyes?'
'You've kissed the Blarney Stone, Mr Clayton.'
'I want, madly, to kiss you.'
'Please, play fair.'
'Love was never a game that could be played by the rules. Hasn't your sister broken every one of them? Hasn't she pitted brother against brother, and yet has the pair of them in love with her? You must face reality, Jorja. Any time Angelica wants Renzo again, your feelings won't matter a brass farthing. They never did matter to her, did they? And I suspect that they never really mattered to him.'
Jorja flinched from the sting of his words; he was saying things that she had said over and over to herself, but hearing them spoken aloud was unutterably painful.
She glanced at her wristwatch. 'I have to be getting home, Bruce. I've enjoyed every mouthful of my lunch, and I've especially liked The Silk Lantern.'
'I usually come here alone, so feel flattered.'
'I feel privileged.' She watched as he settled the bill, noticing the clean strength of his hands as he refolded his wallet and put it away.
As she rose from her chair, he was there beside her and for a moment their eyes met and she was almost tempted to blurt out that she was dreading the aftermath of the funeral, when Renzo had to come to terms not only with grief but with the possible regret of not having his brother with him at the graveside. The words almost broke the bounds of her restraint, then she hurried ahead of Bruce down the stairs that led to the street.
'I think,' she tried to speak casually, 'that it might be better if I went home in a cab.'
'You'll do nothing of the sort.' He took her firmly by the arm and led her across to the small car-park where his car waited. 'What are you afraid of, that I'm going to kiss you?'
'You mustn't ‑' She gazed at him uncertainly; the sun had gone behi
nd a cloud and her face had a pensive look.
'Why,' Bruce touched a hand to her waist, 'afraid you might like it too much?'
She drew away from him and slid quickly into the Porsche. His firm body had touched hers and again she had felt a traitorous longing to give in to nervous uncertainty and the need to be sheltered against the storms of her marriage. She might, indeed, enjoy his kisses, for she had learned in Renzo's arms that she had a responsive nature and a deep need for affection.
With Bruce she might discover the affection, for in his embrace she would be Jorja; she would be herself and not a substitute for Angelica.
Never had temptation felt so strong, and Jorja knew that other women in her shoes would have turned to Bruce and asked softly to see where he lived.
'Well, Jorja,' there was a note of tension in his voice, 'is it your place or mine?'
'Oh—it's Hanson Square,' she replied.
'It would be!'
CHAPTER TEN
They drove away from the restaurant and headed along the Chelsea Embankment. 'We have time, you and I,' Bruce said. 'If you ever need me, or want me, then promise me to be in touch.'
'I promise, Bruce.'
'You have my address?'
'Well—no.'
'I have an apartment at Ranleigh Court in Knightsbridge, number twelve. You're more than welcome, Jorja.'
'You're kind to me and I appreciate it.'
'No,' he contradicted. 'I'm battening down the hatches on what I really want to do. It would be kinder in the long run if I took you anywhere but home to a marriage which is making you unhappy. Look, why not pack your belongings and get out? I'm not saying that you have to come home with me; I could book you into a hotel until you sort out in your mind what you really want to do. What do you say?'
'That I can't do it, Bruce. I can't add to what Renzo's going through. I have to stand by him.' She spoke almost with a touch of panic, as if he had suggested they stop and rob a bank.
The Honeymoon Page 17