But her determination faltered helplessly. She might as well admit it. She couldn’t trust Leo completely. There was still the matter of that letter. He’d said he’d never known Gideon Smallwood, the civil servant who killed himself, and yet she’d seen a letter addressed to the man in Leo’s own hand, lying on Robert’s desk. A lie she was trying to ignore, trying to pretend didn’t matter. Just like yesterday’s tabloid front page. Believe enough in Leo, and everything bad would go away … But would it? She’d just accepted his complete denial about
The Sun
story. Maybe there was more to it, things he wasn’t telling her. Just like the envelope addressed to Gideon Smallwood. Well, she would clear that up. She would ask him about that letter.
In the silence of his flat, Leo gave himself up entirely to work. He worked with the same steadfast absorption as in his early days as a Welsh working-class grammar school boy, when he had striven to block out the reality and poverty of his situation by fixing with single-minded determination on escape to a better world. Back in those days, he knew how much harder it would be for someone without the privileges
of a public school education to achieve the kind of success he sought at the Bar. That knowledge had bred in him a fixed ambition, a determination never to be anything other than first-rate, and he had early on developed unshakeable habits of industry and purpose. Now, surrounded by the material evidence of his intellectual and professional attainments, he worked as assiduously as he had as a student. He bestowed on every ease and every client unstinting care and concentration, and it was a quality which marked him out as being the very best, brilliant in his field.
Yet today he found the seclusion hard to bear. Every lonely sound – the faint hum of the lift, the front door of the building closing as Mrs Gresham took her little dog for a walk, occasional traffic round the leafy square – seemed to highlight his sense of isolation. That story in the paper had made him feel marked out, vilified, and in today’s silent aftermath he had a sense of being set apart from humanity. He regularly worked from home, when he wanted utter peace and quiet, but today his solitude was different. It was enforced. He was in hiding, in retreat.
When the phone rang, he felt a welcome relief. It was the journalist friend whom he’d asked to try to run a piece undermining Melissa Angelicos’s recent story.
‘Just ringing to tell you to check the paper tomorrow. Rather helpfully, the Angelicos woman has apparently had a nervous breakdown. Gone to Italy with her sister for a bit of rest and recuperation. In quite a bad way, people tell me. So what I’ve written helps to suggest she’s an unstable fantasist.’
‘Excellent. Thanks for helping me out.’
‘I’ll call in the favour sometime. See you.’
Leo hung up. So Ms Angelicos had gone off to Italy with her nerves in shreds. The woman should be institutionalised. He glanced at the papers on his desk, and realised he didn’t have the heart for any more work. Instead, he wandered through to the pristine silence of the drawing room and went to the long window overlooking the square. There he stared across at the sun-dappled communal garden, where no children played, and where the clang of the metal gates marked the passage of the well-heeled, mainly elderly inhabitants of the Belgravia square. The only child who had ever played there was Oliver, on weekends when he came to stay. At the thought of his son, Leo’s heart lifted. He longed to see him on Saturday.
He stood there, reflecting. Babyhood had been the easy part with Oliver. Now the little boy was two, and growing conscious of the world around him, and his place in it. In another couple of years he would be moving into a world where life encompassed school, and sport and weekend activities, and friends grew as important as family. The pattern thus far established – of alternate weekends spent here or at Stanton – would have to expand to accommodate new aspects of Oliver’s life beyond nappies and buggies and high chairs. This flat was no good. Leo had never cared that much for it. He’d simply chosen it on impulse when he and Rachel got divorced, probably with the idea that he would go back to his former bachelor existence. A mansion flat in Belgravia wasn’t a suitable place to bring up a small boy.
What he needed was a house, with a garden. Somewhere just like Stanton, but here in London.
The idea grew in him as he stood there. His sense of inertia vanished. He would find a house for himself and Oliver - and Camilla, for as long as that went on. He had sensed that she didn’t feel entirely at ease in the flat, with its pale carpets and high ceilings, tastefully lit pieces of modern art and immaculate furniture. It was no one’s idea of a proper home. On impulse, he looked up three local estate agents in Yellow Pages, and rang and asked them to send details of the kind of place he was looking for. A five or six-bedroomed family house in Kensington or Chelsea, with a decent garden. All right, such a place would cost a fortune, but what was he earning all this money for, if not to provide a home where Oliver would always want to come, and bring his friends to, as he grew up?
Charged with a new sense of domesticity, Leo decided to cook supper for himself and Camilla. He left the flat and headed for Tesco’s in Sloane Square. As he strolled along in the late afternoon sunshine, he realised that ringing the estate agents had rekindled in him the desire for a more settled life. Maybe he and Camilla would work out. Maybe it would be the best thing for him. He would get rid of the flat, find a nice, friendly house, and wait to see if it changed him. In the meantime, he would concentrate on Camilla, on being with her and making her happy. Perhaps if one was single enough of purpose, determined to make it with one person, it could be achieved.
Camilla came to the flat a little after seven, weary from a tedious day spent working on an opinion in a case concerning repudiatory breach of a charterparty. She found Leo in a more buoyant, tranquil mood than she had expected. It vaguely irked her that he should apparently have put the scandal of yesterday behind him so quickly and easily. Was it part of his duplicitous nature that he should jettison problems, be they troublesome events or people, so effortlessly?
He kissed her. ‘You look done in. Glass of wine?’
‘I’d rather have a cup of tea, thanks.’ She followed him through to the kitchen. ‘You seem remarkably cheerful, all things considered.’
‘My way of dealing with adversity. I’ve decided to make fundamental changes in my life. I’m getting out of this place, finding somewhere better for you and me and Oliver. A house. Would you like that?’
She should have been relieved that he was so upbeat, not switching off and becoming distant, as he could when beset by problems, but for some perverse reason she couldn’t capitalise on his good mood. ‘Yes. Of course.’ She nodded.
‘Don’t sound too thrilled.’ He glanced at her. What’s up?’
‘Nothing. Bad day. Horrible case from Eversheds. And Sarah, winding me up about you.’
‘Ignore Sarah. She has a talent for making trouble. What did she say?’
‘Oh, talking about the thing in the papers, suggesting there had to be something behind it.’
‘Come on – you know it’s a complete fabrication. Everything there is to know about that woman, I’ve told you.’ He handed Camilla her tea.
‘I know … But the way Sarah talks, that smile of hers … as though she knows things about you I don’t.’ She regarded him with solemn eyes, ‘How well do I really know you, Leo?’
He put his hands on either side of her face, smoothing back her hair. ‘As well as anyone. As well as anyone I’ve ever loved. You make me feel I could be a better person.’
‘I can’t change anything about you, Leo. I’m not that deluded. You’re who you are. I just don’t think you tell me everything, and that frightens me.’
‘We’ve been through this before.’ He sighed. ‘Come on. What’s brought this on? Not just the thing in yesterday’s papers.’ Tartly, she moved away from him. ‘What else?’
‘The way you still keep things from me. I think I know it all, and then something else crawls out of the woodwork.’
With a past as chequered as his own, Leo knew there was no point in remotely trying to guess what she’d stumbled upon. ‘Such as?’
She hesitated for some seconds before replying. ‘That man, that civil servant who died a couple of weeks ago. Gideon something.’
Leo’s heart sank. ‘Smallwood. Gideon Smallwood.’ He had been enough trouble alive. With his death, Leo had hoped never to have to think about him again. ‘What about him?’
‘You said you hardly knew him, that he was just one of the Lloyd’s Names.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Is that the only way in which you knew him? Professionally? Merely as a client?’
In the few seconds in which Leo hesitated, Camilla could tell he was trying to work out what exactly she knew, and whether or not to lie. ‘Why does it matter?’ he asked. His tone was remote, evasive. She felt heartsick.
‘It matters because I need to know how far you’re prepared to lie to me. You say you hardly knew him, but on the day the Lloyd’s case finished, I saw a letter addressed to him, in your handwriting, on Robert’s desk.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! It was to do with something that happened a while ago, nothing that concerned you. Yes, all right, I knew him personally, not just professionally. He’s dead now, and it doesn’t matter. You can’t be privy to every aspect of my private life, you know.’
She regarded him unhappily. ‘I know. It worries me. I don’t want you to have to lie to me.’
‘The bastard was trying to blackmail me, okay? Are you surprised I didn’t particularly want to discuss it with you? When he died, I thought that was the end of it.’ Leo opened the fridge, took out a half-drunk bottle of white wine, and poured himself a glass. ‘In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it is. Now I’m going to cook us some supper.’
‘Leo! Someone dies alone in his flat, in mysterious circumstances, you tell me he was trying to blackmail you – and you expect me to regard that as perfectly
reasonable? What else is there that I don’t know?’
‘
You
don’t have to make it sound as though I killed him. Look, the little sod was screwing me for a hundred thousand pounds. The fact that I was more than a trifle relieved by his untimely death doesn’t mean I was responsible for it.’
Camilla stared at him. ‘What on earth did you do that was worth a hundred thousand pounds, Leo?’
He returned her stare. ‘Believe it or not, sometimes people are blackmailed for things they
haven’t
done.’
‘All right-what was it you
didn’t
do that was worth so much?’
He looked away. These were things he didn’t want her to know, mainly because there was no need … But the conversation had reached a point where there was no possibility of further evasion. ‘He had some photographs, taken in – in unfortunate circumstances!’
‘Which is a euphemism for – what, exactly?’
Leo set down his wine glass. ‘Right. I’ll tell you, exactly as it happened – it’s not going to sound good, but I want you to believe me that it is the truth. Gideon and I went out for the evening, to dinner, and afterwards he suggested going on somewhere, I had no idea where … It turned out to be some kind of gay brothel. Nothing happened, I was there for no more than five minutes, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out, but some – some boy kissed me. That was all. It happened in seconds, a complete set-up. Gideon got it on camera. The boy was fifteen, in care at the time. A couple of weeks later, Gideon let me know, and demanded a hundred thousand to keep it from the papers.’
Camilla leant against the sink, gazing at him, absorbing this. ‘You were never going to tell me about this, were you?’ She shook her head, looking at him with a hopeless, lost look. ‘I take it this man Gideon was gay. And you were spending time with him, going out with him? It must have been when you had already begun sleeping with me. What do you
do
when you’re not with me, Leo?’
‘I told you! Don’t you listen? We merely dined together! I had no idea where he was taking me afterwards! It was a set-up, the whole thing was fabricated!’
‘Just like the piece in the papers yesterday? Sarah was right. It can’t all be false, can it, Leo? There has to be some element of truth in it. Something you don’t want me to know. There’ll always be something you don’t want me to know. You and this man Gideon. You and Anthony. That’s another thing you never meant to—’
The violence of Leo’s reaction to the mention of Anthony’s name astonished her. He threw his half-drunk glass of wine into the sink, smashing it, making Camilla jump. ‘Don’t bring Anthony into this! Don’t mention his name! You will not judge me, do you understand?’
In the silence that ensued, Camilla’s fear quickly evaporated, leaving her cold and angry. She could tell from Leo’s eyes that he immediately regretted what he had done, but she wasn’t going to wait for him to try to make it better.
‘I think I’d better go.’
Leo said nothing.
She went out into the hallway and picked up her bag.
Leo merely stood leaning in the doorway, watching her. She could read no emotion in his eyes. It would always be like this. She would never really know anything. Stopping now would be for the best.
She closed the door of the flat and went downstairs. At the bottom she paused, waiting, listening. How badly she had wanted him to stop her, to say, ‘No. You’re not to go. This is my fault. Come back.’ But he had simply let her go. She opened the street door and went down the steps. She was better off away from him. He knew it, and so did she. The knowledge made her cry, and she didn’t stop crying all the way home to Clapham.
Leo picked the larger pieces of glass from the sink, flushing the rest away into the grinding maw of the waste disposal. He dropped the shards carefully into the bin, then rinsed and wiped his hands. His instinct, as soon as he heard the sound of the front door closing, had been to go after her, bring her back. But Leo was too old a hand, too practiced for such a simple display of contrition. Besides, there was nothing to be gained from it right now. She was too young, too bewildered and outraged by what she had learnt. She needed some time to work it through, a few days in which to let her feelings get the better of her good sense. She would persuade herself that the Gideon thing didn’t matter, that he hadn’t sought to deceive her so much as protect her. She was also, he knew, too physically dependent upon him, upon his lovemaking – something she was not presently aware of, but would
be acutely so by the time the weekend was up. Give it another couple of days thereafter, and the girl would be such a mixed bag of self-doubt and fraught desire that he would have no difficulty in making everything all right. It was merely a question of leaving her alone for just long enough. Leo knew all too well how to manipulate a young and inexperienced heart. Had he not loved her as much as he did, he might almost have felt ashamed.