home.’
She stiffened. ‘I can’t. I can’t go back there…’ Then, ‘Did you hear something?’
A crash, then the sound of the front door being slammed, the feet pounding down the stairs, made denial impossible and Belle catapulted out of his arms, grabbed a dressing gown, clutching it around herself as she wrenched open the door.
‘Oh…’
She sounded as if she’d been punched, as if the air had been driven from her and he didn’t stop to pull on his pants, but followed, coming to an abrupt halt in the doorway of the small third bedroom that Belle had converted to a wardrobe and dressing room.
The dress that she’d worn for the awards ceremony, the lace evening coat, had been reduced to litter. Mere shreds of material.
Daisy.
How long must it have taken her? How long had she been home? Seeing his coat hanging beside Belle’s, the shut bedroom door, standing there, listening to the sounds made by two people lost to the world as they made love.
He looked up and saw that the scissors she’d used had been flung at the mirror.
His instinct was to reach for Belle, protect her from this, but she twitched away from him, rejecting a gesture of comfort that an hour before she’d begged for, the kind of gesture that was fast becoming second nature to him.
‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘Something bad.’ She turned on him. ‘She needed me, Ivo, and I wasn’t there for her.’
He drew in a breath, hunting for something to say, anything to help reassure her. To reassure himself. The painful reality was that sometimes there were no words.
‘She’ll have gone to the squat.’
‘Why would she do that? She knows it’s the first place I’ll look for her.’
He wondered if the switch from ‘we’ to ‘I’ was conscious, or whether Belle had slipped instinctively into self- preservation mode in anticipation of what was to come, already anticipating the worst.
‘She wants you to find her, Belle.’ He indicated the coat stand where she’d hung the expensive quilted jacket that her sister had bought her alongside his overcoat. ‘She didn’t take a coat.’
Because she wanted to punish her sister, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
‘She’ll be freezing.’
‘Come on, I’ll drive you-’
‘No!’ Then, more firmly, ‘No.’
Daisy had helped to bring them closer, to open up, let light and air into the dark core of suffering that they’d chosen to bury, but she was a loose cannon and, in her need, was just as capable of driving them apart.
Forced to choose between them-and Daisy would make her choose-Belle, driven by guilt, would sacrifice anything to convince her sister that she was loved. Him. Her own happiness.
All he could do was hang in there. Do whatever he could to make it easy for her. Starting now.
‘She’ll want to shout at someone. Blame someone for the fact that when she needed you, you were in bed with me. If I’m there she can use me as her verbal punch bag,’ he said.
‘I wanted you, Ivo. This isn’t your fault.’
‘This isn’t about us. She needs you, Belle. I’m dispensable.’
The squat had been secured against intruders-he’d called the property developers himself to make sure it was done quickly and they’d made a solid job of it.
Daisy had clearly tried to kick her way in-there were footprints on the new board-but, beaten, she was now sitting, hunched up, shivering, her hands stuffed into her sleeves, on a low wall.
Belle said nothing, just handed her the coat she’d left behind and was invited, in the most basic of terms, to go away. Her response was to take off her own coat, lay the two of them side by side on the wall and sit down beside her.
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ she asked matter-of-factly.
‘Like you care.’
‘If I didn’t care I wouldn’t be here. What happened?’ she repeated quietly.
‘You
Daisy sounded more like a petulant child than a grown woman, Ivo thought, but she’d been through a lot. Would need a great deal of help, counselling, endless amounts of that unconditional love that Belle talked about, to build up her self-esteem. He knew from experience that it was a full-time job.
‘When wasn’t I there?’ Belle asked patiently.
‘This morning when the agency phoned.’
‘I was at work, Daisy. You know that.’ Calm, steady. He knew how hard that was and he was desperately proud of her. ‘What did they want?’
‘They found my dad.’
‘What?’
Belle, doing her best to remain calm, composed, controlled, was shaken to her foundations and Daisy finally looked at her.
‘They called this morning to tell me that they’d found him.’
‘But they shouldn’t have…’ She’d given express instructions to the agency.
‘What? Told me? Why? He was
‘I know, but…I wanted to be there when they talked to you. You shouldn’t have been on your own.’
‘It’s nothing new.’
‘That was then. This is now.’
‘Right.’ Disbelief. A glance in Ivo’s direction that said it all.
‘I can’t believe they told you. Wait until-’
‘They thought I was you. One Miss Porter is pretty much like another on the telephone. They had news; I wasn’t going to say call back when my big sister’s home, was I?’ And, without warning, her face crumpled. ‘He’s dead, Bella. My dad died six months ago. I went to see his grave. I took flowers. It was horrible. There was no headstone. No name. Just a number.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Belle said, putting her arms around her. ‘You shouldn’t have been alone.’ And she never would be again. This afternoon she’d seen a different Ivo-someone caring, someone capable of immense feeling, the man she’d glimpsed in those first heady days, the man she’d fallen in love with and she’d wanted him, had pushed him into something he knew was a mistake. Selfish, selfish, selfish…‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, please!’ She shook her off. ‘You don’t care. You hated him, blamed him for everything.’ Belle, Ivo could see, was struggling to find a response that wasn’t going to curdle in her mouth, something to comfort Daisy, but her sister didn’t wait. ‘You hated him and you don’t give a damn about me.’ She looked up, glared at him over Belle’s shoulder and said, ‘He’s the only person you ever think about.’
‘No…’
‘It’s true. He’s always calling you. When you talk to him your face goes all soft and gooey and when I came home he was there, in your room. I heard you! You’re supposed to be separated, getting a divorce, not having sex in the middle of the afternoon!’
Her youthful outrage would have been funny, Ivo thought, but he felt no urge to laugh. Belle’s desperate ‘No…’ had chilled him to the bone. He’d known it would be bad-the destruction of the dress was not the work of a girl mildly irritated with her sister-but this was worse than he could ever have imagined.
And when Belle turned and looked at him, he knew he was right. Knew that she would sacrifice her own happiness, this tender shoot that promised a new beginning to their marriage-anything to make up to her sister for a mistake she’d made when she was fourteen years old. A decision she’d made for the best of reasons. The truth was that Daisy needed one hundred per cent of her sister right now and that was what she’d get.
There was nothing he could do or say to change Belle’s mind. That to even try would be to hurt her more than she was already hurting.
He knew because he’d have done the same for Miranda. Would have sacrificed anything to make her well, make her whole; but her words, as she continued to look at him, still tore his heart from his body.
