‘But sixty!’
‘I don’t think your age is the issue here, Dad,’ snapped Harry. He folded the paper he had been reading and put it aside. ‘They’ve made complete jerks of us.’
‘I don’t know what you’re so worried about, they’ve barely mentioned you. Probably because you’re so boring.’
Harry turned to his brother, tempted, just this once, to put the advantage of his height and weight to good use. Predictably Nick’s subdued sackcloth-and-ashes routine had been all too brief; now he was well on the road to reverting back to his old irritating self. It had been too much to expect that the novelty of the reformed character he had sworn to become would last more than a week. ‘Blame by association is enough to be going on with, Nick,’ he said. He stood up. ‘And if you’ve got any sense, you’ll all realise that what’s printed here about our family isn’t far off the mark.’
He left them arguing among themselves and headed down to the beach where he sat on the pebbles and stared out at the sea. They were returning home in three days’ time and he couldn’t wait to leave. Spending the summer with his parents had been a crazy idea. He should never have agreed to it. He should have stuck to his guns and gone backpacking round Turkey.
But if he had done that he would never have met Francesca.
He threw a stone into the water and watched the ripples extend further and further in the calm sea. Nothing happens in isolation, he thought. Everything is connected.
He got to his feet and decided to walk into Kassiópi and ring Francesca from one of the public phones in the harbour. He had held off until now, not wanting to push it with her, but after reading all that stuff in the papers he wanted to see how she and her family were taking it.
Mark said goodbye to his agent and rang off. He had phoned Julian to make sure that his wish to keep his private life out of the press would be respected.
He stood at the kitchen window that overlooked the terrace and wondered whether Izzy would mind if they went back to Theo’s villa. They had spent the night here at Max and Laura’s so that they could be on hand for the first of the faxes, but now he wanted to get on with some work. He was about to interrupt her shower to ask her this when the phone rang. Though he knew it couldn’t be for him, he picked it up anyway. Without preamble, a shrill voice demanded to speak to Isobel Jordan. ‘I’m afraid she’s busy at the moment,’ he said.
‘Nothing new in that. She’s always too busy to speak to her mother.’
Ah, so here was the infamous Prudence Jordan. He leaned back against the wall and settled in for a chat. ‘She’s in the shower, Mrs Jordan. Can I get her to return your call?’
‘A shower at this time of day? But it’s nearly lunchtime.’
‘Maybe for you but for us it’s well past lunchtime. But, then, we don’t have any restrictions on the use of bathrooms here.’ He couldn’t resist tossing in that final comment just to see how she would react. He heard a sharp intake of breath, and sensed her uncurling herself, like a coiled snake.
‘To whom am I speaking?’
He smiled to himself. Now the fun would start. ‘My name’s Mark, and I’m a friend of your daughter.’
He caught another sharp inhalation of breath. ‘You’re the one in the newspaper, aren’t you? You’re the drunk she’s hitched herself up with.’
He’d had worse, but as opening accusations went, it wasn’t bad. ‘She may well have hitched up with me, Mrs Jordan, but as for being a drunk — ’
‘Oh, don’t think you can be clever with me, young man. Just because you’re a writer, don’t imagine for one moment you can twist my words round to make me look silly.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, not when you’re so capable of doing that all on your own.’
He missed her reply as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Izzy come into the kitchen. Fresh from the shower, she was still wet and wearing only a towel, her hair pulled back sleekly from her face. It made her look even younger. He beckoned her over.
‘Who is it?’ she mouthed.
‘Your mother,’ he whispered. ‘We’re getting along like a house on fire.’
Her eyes opened wide and she clutched at the towel. ‘Give it to me, let me speak to her.’
After a brief tussle, he passed her the receiver, and in a voice that he knew was loud enough for Izzy’s mother to hear, said, ‘Say goodbye to the old witch from me, won’t you?’
Izzy visibly paled as she took the receiver. ‘No, Mum, he was joking. Of course he didn’t mean it.’
‘Says who?’
‘Please, Mark,’ she begged.
He put his head next to hers so that he could hear what was being said.
‘What’s wrong, Mum? Why have you phoned?’
‘I might have known you would try and take the innocent approach, but I suppose you’re proud of yourself, aren’t you, parading your reputation in the papers for all the world to see? Did you stop to think what people would think? Or how it would make me look? It was your aunt who showed me. She rushed straight here soon as she could to have a gloat at my expense. A drunk and a drug addict, the paper says. How could you, Isobel? He’ll be totally unreliable. He’ll probably get you hooked as well. He’ll lie to you and steal from you, they do that. They can’t stop themselves.’
‘Mother!
This is ridiculous. Mark’s put all that behind — ’
‘Well, he would tell you that, wouldn’t he? But you know what they say, once a drunk, always a drunk. And he’ll have brought all his problems on himself, see if I’m not wrong. Weak-willed, that’s what he’ll be. But be it on your own head. Don’t come crying to me when he’s used and abused you. Though God knows what he sees in a simpleton like you. Or perhaps that’s the appeal.’
This was too much for Mark, and he wrenched the phone out of Izzy’s hand. ‘I’m well aware, Mrs Jordan, that you’ve had problems of your own over the years, but the only one who’s using and abusing your daughter is
you!
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to cut you off so that I can try and undo some of the harm you’ve caused.’
‘Well, really — ’
But that was as far as Mark allowed her to go. He slammed the phone down and took Izzy in his arms. Tears were filling her eyes and he stroked them away. He kissed her forehead. ‘She’s going to make a formidable mother-in-law for some poor sod,’ he said, lifting her chin and willing a smile back on to her face.
‘Only a very stupid man would want to marry me,’ she murmured faintly.
‘Or how about a very stupid man who was wildly in love with you?’
Chapter Forty-Three
A week later, and with the furore caused by the invasion of bounty-hunters for the British press now behind them, Angelos brought Izzy and Mark the news that somebody new had come to stay in what had been the Pattersons’ villa — they had gone home to Dulwich. He also told them that the Fitzgeralds were vacating Villa Mimosa in the next couple of days. With his ear pressed so firmly to the grape-vine, Angelos was able to tell them that Silent Bob had at last got himself a foothold in the property market on the island. He had joined forces with a Norwegian businessman, and between them they were providing the financial backing for a holiday village to be built in the south of Corfu, which would unashamedly appeal to the young crowd. With the contract signed, he was now keen to pack up, return home and see to his other business interests.
Nothing had been seen of the pair, not on the beach, not up at the supermarket, not even in Kassiópi in one of the tavernas. But, then, as Mark had said, the embarrassment of seeing herself in the papers as others saw her was probably keeping Dolly-Babe firmly indoors, away from prying eyes.
The news that the Fitzgeralds would soon be leaving had Izzy suddenly wanting to see Dolly-Babe for one last time: there were questions she wanted answering. She wanted to know how the journalists had unearthed so much about Nick and Sally’s near-drowning accident. Details had been printed that Dolly-Babe just couldn’t have known. She hadn’t been there, so how had she known that Nick and Sally had been drunk, or that they had been smoking an illegal substance? It was possible that Nick might have told the journalists what had happened, but Izzy couldn’t imagine Mrs Patterson letting her son speak so unguardedly.
Determined to have her answer, and fired up on curiosity that just wouldn’t go away, she decided to go and have it out with Dolly-Babe before it was too late and she lost her chance. Sitting on the terrace with Mark she told him what she had in mind.
Hardly raising his head from his notepad, he said, ‘Fine by me, just so long as you don’t expect me to come with you.’
‘That’s okay, I’ll go on my own. I’d rather not witness her fawning all over you.’
Now he did look at her. ‘Pumpkin pie, you’re not jealous of the thing I’ve got going with that woman, are you
?
’
She waved his comment aside. ‘You’re welcome to her, Mark. Just say the word and I’ll be on my way.’
He sucked on the end of his pen. ‘It’s a hard choice, you or Dolly-Babe. You’ll have to let me sleep on it. What do you intend saying to her?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. But one thing I will get out of her is a promise that she’ll apologise to Max and Laura tomorrow afternoon when they arrive. It’s the least she could do in the circumstances for acting so maliciously. She may have felt slighted over that silliness with Theo, but she went too far in her desire to get her own back.’
‘My, my, what a fierce little tiger you’ve turned into.’
Walking up the hillside in the hot sunshine towards her prey, Izzy did indeed feel as though she had turned into a different person. Not only was she a hussy — a shameless one at that — she was now a predatory cat preparing to pounce on somebody who had hurt her friends.
Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. It was perhaps only a thin veneer of courage that she had acquired. Not thick enough yet to deal with her mother, she suspected.
After that terrible phone conversation, Izzy had dreaded the telephone ringing again and her mother hurling more words of bitterness at her. Mark’s solution was to return to Theo’s villa where there would be no danger of Prudence Jordan tracking her down. ‘But I’m running away from her, aren’t I? I should be able to stand my ground. I should face up to — ’
‘Ssh,’ he had said, holding her tight, ‘It’ll come. When you’re ready, it’ll come.’
She hadn’t even been brave enough to check the answerphone when she went back each day to make sure that the villa hadn’t been broken into overnight. Again, Mark had helped. He had come with her to shield her from the task of listening to any potentially poisonous outbursts from her mother. To her relief, there were no furious messages left for her, only a much friendlier one from Laura giving Izzy their flight details. Tagged on to the end of it was: ‘I suppose you’re not there because you’re with that gorgeous tortured soul again. I hope you’re not indulging in unprotected sex, Izzy. See you soon.’
Mark had looked at her with cool amusement. ‘Perhaps you ought to ring her and put her mind at rest, tell her that we’re being eminently sensible and grown up.’
In bed that night as Mark lay staring up at the ceiling, his hands laced behind his head, he had said, ‘What would you do if you did find you were pregnant? After all, condoms do have a failure rate.’
She had frozen into a rigid block of uncertainty. How had he sneaked that up on her so stealthily? And why? When a man asked a question like that it usually meant one thing: that he was getting cold feet. He had never actually said
I love you,
but was he now worrying that he had implied it by his actions? Was he now searching for an escape route? Her mother’s triumphant face swam before her:
That’s what you get for being so quick to leap into his bed! It’s only ever about sex.
‘Um ... I don’t know.’
‘But you must.’
Oh, heavens, what could she say? There was no right answer. Tell him she would want to keep the baby and he would think she would use it as a bargaining tool to trap him —
See, now you’ll have to marry me.
But say she would get rid of it and he would think she was callous and cold-hearted: a wicked woman quite prepared to throw away his child. It was hopeless, she couldn’t win.
In the silence that was stretching uncomfortably between them, he said, ‘Let me put it to you this way, would it be so very bad if you were pregnant?’
‘But I’m not, am I?’ she sidestepped.
He turned to face her. ‘What’s wrong? It’s a simple enough question. Nail it for me, Izzy.’
She swallowed. ‘But it isn’t that simple. There’s more going on behind your words than you’re admitting to.’
‘Really. Such as?’
‘You’re ... you’re setting a trap for me.’
He rolled on to his side and kissed her. ‘Stop trying to make me feel cheap, Izzy.’ Pushing back the sheet, he placed a warm hand over her stomach. It was the most loving and tender of acts. ‘Do you think I’d make a good father?’ There was a look in his eyes and a depth of emotion in his voice she had never seen or heard before.
‘No,’ she said lightly, the sensual warmth of his palm spreading through her, ‘you’d frighten your children to death with your horrific bedtime stories.’
‘And if I promised to stick to the Brothers Grimm for their bedtime tales?’
‘Mm ... maybe then you’d be okay.’
He lowered his head and pressed his lips to where his hand had been. ‘So what’s your answer?’
‘It depends what you’re really asking me.’
‘I think you know what I’m getting at. I’m asking how you’d feel, one day, having my children within the context of a death-do-us-part situation.’
Half laughing, but half terrified, she looked at him nervously. Was he serious? ‘But, Mark, you scarcely know me. You — you ...’ But the words fizzled out. What could she say? As crazy as it was, especially in view of the short space of time they had known each other, she knew that, given the opportunity, and as reckless as it was, she would happily run off into the sunset with Mark, and on any day he cared to name. But was it really possible that he felt the same for her?