Deep Waters (2 page)

‘I told her she could stay here at the vicarage,’ said Brian. ‘Just for a month or two. You don’t mind, do you, Janey?’

A month. Or
two
. Jane stared at her husband as though he’d taken leave of his senses. Which, it would seem, he had done.

‘We have all this space here, especially with the boys away,’ he went on. ‘The guest room is made up, isn’t it? Callie won’t be any trouble.’

‘But she has a
dog
.’

Brian shrugged. ‘Oh, that won’t be a problem. Bella’s a quiet little thing, and we have a big garden. It’s not as if you’re allergic to dogs.’

Allergic to dogs. That was hardly the point. ‘But…isn’t there anywhere else she can go?’ Jane managed. ‘An hotel?

‘You said it yourself, Janey,’ Brian said with infuriating patience. ‘She has a dog. She can’t stay in an hotel with a dog.’

‘How about her mother’s?’

He shook his head. ‘Her mother lives in Kensington. Callie needs to be in the parish.’

‘Surely there are people in the parish…’ Jane looked down into her soup bowl, struggling to keep her voice even. ‘Can’t you ask round, Brian? I can think of several people. Elderly ladies on their own in big houses, like Mildred Channing, or Hilary Dalton?’

He raised his eyebrows and gave her a quizzical look. ‘I’d almost think you didn’t
want
her here, Janey. This is the logical place for her to stay. You must see that.’

Jane swallowed hard. She had one last argument in her
arsenal
and now was the time to bring it out. ‘What about the… the money?’

‘Money? What do you mean?’

Of course, thought Jane, Brian never worried about little things like money. It was up to her—and always had been—to eke out his stipend till the end of each month, to pay the bills
and put food on the table. ‘Her meals,’ Jane said baldly. ‘Am I expected to feed her out of my housekeeping money?’

Brian grinned, clearly pleased with himself. ‘This is the best thing about it, Janey. I rang the EIO. The insurance company. They’ll pay to put Callie’s belongings in store. And they’ll pay
us
. There will be a weekly cheque coming in for her accommodation!’

That, realised Jane, was it. She may as well give up and accept it.

The storm had passed, bringing behind it unseasonably warm temperatures and sunshine. It was, in short, too nice a day for Mark Lombardi to eat his lunch in the police station canteen. Instead he picked up a sandwich and headed for his favourite green space.

Newcomers to London were always surprised at how much green space was to be found in the nation’s capitol city. Mark, as a London native, took for granted the vast expanses of Hyde Park, to the south of the station, Regents Park, to the north-east, and the more modest Paddington Green, round the corner. But there were smaller green spaces as well, tucked away in unexpected places—tiny squares, little parks, churchyards. Some time ago Mark had discovered one of the latter just a short walk from the station: a secluded churchyard with a bench where he could sit and eat his sandwich in peace and feel a million miles away from the bustle of London.

And sitting in a churchyard, even if it wasn’t
her
churchyard, somehow made him feel closer to Callie: more a part of the world she lived in. Thinking about Callie, imagining what she was doing at any given moment, was something Mark did a great deal of these days, wherever he was.

If anyone had told Mark Lombardi, six months ago, how much his life could change in half a year, he wouldn’t really have believed them.

All it had taken was that trip to Venice to visit his
grandmother
. On the way back to London, he’d been seated next to an engaging young woman with shiny brown bobbed hair, and they’d talked for the entire flight as if they’d known each other for years. That’s how it had started; by the time they’d landed he knew that he wanted to see Callie Anson again. And again and again.

Mark wondered, not for the first time, about the vagaries of fate. What if the woman at the airline check-in had assigned him a different seat that day? What if Callie hadn’t commented on the Italian newspaper he was reading, and drawn him into conversation? So many variables…And yet there was such an inevitability about it, looking at it from the perspective of the present. Here, now, sitting in this churchyard, he could not
imagine
his life without Callie in it. She was woven into the fabric of his thoughts, day and night; they saw each other most evenings, and in between they spoke on the phone. She was even—miracle of miracles—accepted by
la famigilia Lombardi
, that formidable institution which pretty much governed his life.

He still couldn’t believe that Mamma liked Callie. He’d been so prepared for the opposite that he’d delayed their meeting for months. After all, he had been programmed for his entire thirty-one years to bring home a nice Italian girl, with all that implied. And Callie wasn’t just an Anglo: she was an Anglican. An Anglican in Holy Orders, at that.

To Mark’s astonishment, Mamma had taken it all in her stride. Callie had won her over without even trying. And where Mamma led, Pappa followed. Pappa thought Callie was wonderful.

It was a mystery.

Mark took a bite out of his cheese and pickle sandwich and looked at the clump of daffodils near the church porch. They were a bit battered in the wake of the storm, but still held their yellow heads upright.

Rather like his sister Serena, he thought. The events of the last few months had been horrendous for her. Yet she had carried on,
head held high, as if nothing had changed. Mamma and Pappa hadn’t known—hadn’t even suspected—that she was
heartbroken
, bearing the burden of her husband Joe’s infidelity.

She had—in the throes of her anguish—confided in Mark. It had shaken him pretty badly as well. He had known Joe di Stefano for most of his life, and his sister’s marriage had always seemed rock-solid to him, the exemplar of all that marriage should be.

Marriage. That brought Mark’s thoughts round to his good friend Neville—Detective Inspector Neville Stewart.

If Mark’s life had changed in six months, Neville’s had altered beyond recognition. From being a confirmed and carefree
bachelor
, he had transformed into a married man. And it had been even more of a shock to Mark than it had to Neville.

Neville had played his cards so close to his chest that Mark had had no idea what was going on. Yes, he knew that Neville was seeing someone, early on when Mark himself was getting to know Callie. But his absorption with his own new relationship had blunted his curiosity, and within a few weeks Neville had told him, in his taciturn way, that things were over between himself and Triona. Neville had never been comfortable talking about
emotions
, about things of the heart; he often kidded Mark about his Mediterranean temperament, wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Suddenly, then, just before Christmas: an engagement. Neville had told him over a drink at their favourite pub. ‘Seems I’m getting married,’ he’d said casually, halfway through his first pint of Guinness.

Mark could only stare at him. ‘Married? But who to?’

‘Triona O’Neil. Will you be my best man?’

‘I’d be honoured. But…’

Eventually he’d pried it out of Neville. He and Triona had lived together for a few months, some years earlier. Their
break-up
had been painful; Neville had really never got over her. Then they met again by chance, were drawn together briefly, and split again.

‘But I finally realised,’ Neville said, looking down into his Guinness, ‘that I didn’t want to live without her. It was like…a lightbulb going on over my thick head. Difficult as it is to be with her, being without her is worse. Much worse.’

He had proposed to her, he confessed, at the top of the London Eye. He’d done it properly, going down on his knees.

‘And she said yes?’ Mark surmised.

She’d said yes—or at least maybe, at that point. And that wasn’t all she’d said.

‘I’m going to be a dad,’ Neville told him, pulling a bemused face.

Triona had broken the news to him immediately after her provisional acceptance of his proposal: the one time they’d slept together, there had been consequences which neither of them had expected. She’d known about it for weeks but hadn’t been planning to tell him.

‘It’s not like I wouldn’t have figured it out eventually,’ Neville said wryly. ‘But she didn’t want me to feel like I had to marry her. Even after I proposed, and she told me about the baby, she said that if it made any difference to the way I felt, then we’d call it off there and then.’

Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘And how
do
you feel about it?’

There was a long pause while Neville emptied his glass. ‘It scares the crap out of me,’ he said frankly. ‘I just never thought… I never really thought about having kids. I know that sounds stupid. But it’s like…being old or something. A wife is one thing. But a kid?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m still getting my head round it, to tell you the truth.’

That sounded a bit worrisome to Mark. ‘You need to be sure,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t marry her if you’re not sure—about the whole package.’

‘That’s what Triona said.’ Neville stood up, ready to go to the bar to get the next round. ‘So we’re not rushing into anything. We’re going to wait a couple of months, to give me time to get used to the idea. But I
am
going to marry her, mate,’ he added firmly. ‘So you can start working on your speech now.’

The wedding had taken place the previous weekend, and now Neville was on his honeymoon. Mark thought about it as he finished his sandwich.

It had been a small wedding, held at a posh hotel in the City. Neville had cleaned up well, looking positively handsome in his hired dinner jacket. And Triona, her bump unabashedly visible beneath her gown of clingy, creamy bias-cut satin, was a radiant bride. The guest list was limited to a few friends on either side: Triona’s solicitor pals, and Neville’s police colleagues. Mark was best man, and Callie’s great friend Frances Cherry was Triona’s attendant.

No family—not on either side. That seemed the strangest thing of all to Mark. He couldn’t imagine a wedding without family. If it had been
his
wedding, it would have been awash with them, streaming in from near and far. Nonna—his
grandmother
—would have come from Venice, and no doubt other Italian relations as well.

Nonetheless the wedding had moved Mark deeply. As the couple said their vows he watched Neville’s face, and his friend looked as if he’d won the lottery and inherited a brewery on the same day. And Triona, when the ring was slipped on her finger, glowed with a transcendent beauty which was partly to do with motherhood and all to do with love.

It made Mark want to rush to Callie’s side, throw himself at her feet, and beg her to marry him. During the wedding
breakfast
, as she sat beside him looking as lovely as he’d ever seen her, the urge was powerful.

So why hadn’t he done it?

Mark still wasn’t entirely sure. It was partly to do with a failure of imagination. Their wedding: what would it be like? Yes, there would be family there, in abundance. But that in itself would be an issue rife with possibilities for problems. His ardently Roman Catholic family would take a dim view of a wedding held in an Anglican church. Yet that wasn’t just a possibility—it was a certainty. Callie was an ordained clergywoman, within a few months of being a priest. It was who she
was
, not a mere
religious preference. Her wedding should by rights take place in her own church. What would his family make of that?

Even more than that, though, he had been constrained by something Serena had said to him on the evening he’d introduced Callie to the family, just before Christmas. He and his sister had had a heart-to-heart talk in the kitchen over the washing-up.

‘What do you think?’ Mark had asked her; he knew that she knew the answer he wanted.

‘She’s lovely,’ said Serena. ‘Very nice, Marco.’ If her voice conveyed a bit less enthusiasm than her words, at least the words were the right ones.