‘That’s because they’re both nearly seventy.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me this morning?’
‘Because I was enjoying myself. I don’t mind being thought of as a woman with a host of admirers.’
‘Miss Lincoln, you have the soul of a tease.’
‘Sure I have. It’s very useful. My husband got quite uptight about those cards at first. Right to the end I’m not sure he really believed my parents sent them.’
‘The end? You’re a widow?’
‘Oh, no, he’s still alive. He came close to meeting a sudden end a few times but I resisted that temptation.’
‘Your better self asserted itself.’
‘No, I don’t have a better self,’ she said cheerfully. ‘He just wasn’t worth the hassle. With my luck, I’d never have got away with it, so I let him live.’
She finished with a shrug, as though the whole thing was just too trivial for words, but he felt as though he’d had a glimpse through a keyhole. It was narrow, but the details he could see suggested a whole vista, waiting to be revealed.
The waiter appeared to clear away their plates.
‘I gather he didn’t deserve to live,’ Primo said casually.
‘That’s what I thought, but I’m probably doing him an injustice. He wasn’t really the monster I made him into. I told myself that love conquered all, and then blamed him when that turned out to be nonsense. And we married too young. I was eighteen, he was twenty-one. I suppose we changed into different people-or discovered the people we really were all the time.’
‘I don’t think this is who you really were all the time,’ he said with sudden urgency. ‘This is what he did to you.’
‘He taught me a lot of things, including the value of total and utter selfishness. Boy, is that ever the way to get ahead! Tunnel vision. Wear blinkers and look straight down the line to what you want.’
He’d often said the same himself, but he couldn’t bear hearing his own ruthlessness from her.
‘Don’t,’ he said, reaching out swiftly and laying a finger over her lips. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, moving her lips against his finger before he drew it away. ‘It’s too revealing, isn’t it? I need a better act. How lucky that I have you to practise on.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ he said wryly.
‘I mean that I don’t have to pretend with you. We can afford honesty. Why, what is it?’ She’d seen his sudden unease.
‘Nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘But the waiter wants to serve the next course.’
The mention of honesty had reminded him that he was sailing under false colours. But at the same time he had an exhilarating feeling of having found a new kind of honesty. His heart was open to her, his defences down as never before. Was this what Hope had been trying to tell him all the time?
‘So your husband taught you all about selfishness?’ he said.
‘I guess I was a willing learner.’
It hurt him to hear her slander herself, but she seemed driven to do it, as though that way she could erect a defensive shield against the world.
‘Did you ever want children?’
She hesitated a long time before saying, ‘I wanted
‘So the career wasn’t going to be everything to you?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Not like now.’
‘No, not like now. But then I met David and it overturned all my ideas. I wanted to be his wife and have his babies so much that it hurt.
‘Somehow it was never the right time for him. He said we were too young-which I suppose we were, and there were “things to do first”. That’s how he put it. I just said yes to whatever he wanted. It seemed a fair bargain as long as he loved me.’
She said the words with no deliberate attempt at pathos, but with a kind of incredulous wonder that anyone could believe such stuff.
‘But he didn’t,’ Primo said gently.
She made no reply. She was barely conscious of him. Something had drawn her back into the person she used to be, naive, giving and totally, blindly in love. The impression was so strong that she could almost feel David there again-confident, charming, with the ability to take her to the top of the world-then dash her down.
Never again.
‘No, he didn’t,’ she said. ‘I was useful to him, but only for a while. He used to wear expensive clothes because he had to make a good impression at work. I made do with the cheapest I could find because who cared what I looked like?’
‘Didn’t he?’
‘You should have heard him on that subject. He was very good. “Darling, it doesn’t matter whether your dress is costly or the cheapest thing in the market. To me, you’re always beautiful.” What is it?’
She asked the question because he had covered his eyes in anguish.
‘I can’t bear this,’ he said. ‘It’s such a corny line. I thought it was dead and buried years ago.’
‘Well, it rose from the grave,’ she said tartly. ‘And, to save you asking, yes, I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.’
‘I’ll bet
‘You’re right. I bought him a shirt once-not expensive, but I thought it was nice. He sat me down, explained that he couldn’t be seen in it, and asked if I had the receipt. He returned it to the shop, got the money back, then added some money of his own to buy what he called “a decent one”. It was his way of letting me know what was good enough for him and what wasn’t.’
‘And you let him live?’ Primo demanded, scandalised.
‘I think I was kind of hypnotised by him. I wouldn’t let myself believe what I was discovering. And he looked fantastic in the new shirt. If a man’s incredibly handsome you somehow don’t think he can be a jerk.’
She lapsed into silence and sat brooding into her glass, trying to make a difficult decision. What came next was something she’d never been able to speak of before.
Yet here she was, on the verge of telling her most painful secret to a man she’d known only a day. But that day might have been a year, she seemed to know him so well. All her instincts reassured her that he was a friend and she could trust him with anything.
‘Tell me,’ he said gently. ‘What happened then?’
She gave a faint smile.
‘He had to work on a marketing project. By that time I had a job in the same firm. I was down at the bottom of the ladder but I understood the business and I helped him with the project. I’d done that before and, if I say it myself, the best ideas in that project were mine.
‘In fact the layout and presentation were mine too. He used to say that my talent was knowing how to say things. I was flattered, until it dawned on me that what he really meant was that he was the one with talent, and all I could do was the superficial stuff.’
‘But firms will pay big money for someone who can do “the superficial stuff”. It’s what marketing and presentation is about, and I’m surprised you don’t know that.’
She gave him a shy smile that went to his heart.
‘Well, I do know it now,’ she said. ‘But not then. I didn’t understand a lot of things then. As far as I knew, David was the great talent in the family.’
‘Because that’s what he kept telling you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Meanwhile he stole your ideas and used them to climb the ladder?’
‘He was promoted to be the boss’s deputy. That’s how he met the boss’s daughter, who was also working there. One day I went up to the top floor to pay him a surprise visit. We’d had a row and I wanted to make up. Rosalie was there, leaning forward over his desk, with her head close to his.
