That boy had been vulnerable and still able to show it, to the extent of telling a total stranger that a betrayal of trust had broken his heart. Now he was a man who inspired fear, who would deny having a heart, who would probably jeer at the idea of trust.
What had really happened all those years ago? And could it ever be put right for him?
She thought again of dancing with him, the other women with their envious, lustful glances as they relived hours spent in bed with that tall, strong body, yielding ecstatically to skills they’d found in no other man.
‘Are you all right?’ Lysandros asked suddenly.
‘Yes-why do you ask?’
‘You drew a sharp breath, as though you were in pain.’
‘No, I’m not in pain,’ she hurried to say.
Unless, she thought, you included the pain of wanting something you’d be wiser not to want. She pretended to search her bag. When she glanced up she found him regarding her with a look of wonder.
‘Fifteen years,’ he said. ‘So much has happened and we’ve changed, and yet in another way we’re still the same people. I would have known you anywhere.’
She smiled. ‘But you didn’t recognise me.’
‘Only on the surface. Inside, there was a part of me that knew you. I never thought we’d meet again, and yet somehow I was always certain that we would.’
She nodded. ‘Me too. If we’d waited another fifteen years-or fifty-I’d still have been sure that we would one day talk again before we died.’
The last words seemed to reach right inside him. To talk again before they died. That was it. He knew that normally his own thoughts would have struck him as fanciful. He was a strong man, practical, impatient of anything that he couldn’t pin down. Yet what he said was true. She’d been an unseen presence in his life ever since that night.
He wondered how he could tell her this. She’d inspired him with the will to talk freely, but that wasn’t enough. He didn’t know how.
The food arrived, feta and tomato slices, simple and delicious.
‘Mmm,’ she said blissfully.
He ate little, spending most of his time watching her.
‘Why were you up there?’ he asked at last. ‘Why not downstairs, enjoying the wedding?’
‘I guess I’m a natural cynic.’ She smiled. ‘My grandfather used to say that I approached life with an attitude of,
‘How do you feel about the madhouse?’
‘I enjoy it, as long as I’m not asked to get too deeply involved in it or take it seriously.’
‘You’ve never wanted to be a film actress yourself?’
‘Good grief, no! One raving lunatic in the family is enough.’
‘Does your mother know you talk like that?’
‘Of course. She actually said it first, and we’re agreed. She’s a sweetie and I adore her, but she lives on the Planet Zog.’
‘How old is she really?’
‘As old as she needs to be at any one moment. She was seventeen when she had me. My father didn’t want any responsibility, so he just dumped her, and she struggled alone for a while. Believe me, anyone who just sees her as a film star should see the back streets of London where we lived in those years.
‘Then my father’s parents got in touch to say that he’d just died in a road accident. They hadn’t even known we existed until he admitted it on his deathbed. They were Greek, with strong ideas about family, and I was all the family they had left. Luckily, they were nice people and we all got on well. They looked after me while Estelle built her career. My grandfather was a scholar who’d originally come to England to run a course in Greek at university. At first I didn’t even go to school because he reckoned he could teach me better, and he was right.’
‘So you grew up as the one with common sense?’
‘Well, one of us had to have some,’ she chuckled.
‘How did you manage with all those stepfathers?’
‘They were OK. Mostly they were lovelorn and a bit dopey, so I had a hard job keeping a straight face.’
‘What about the one in Las Vegas?’
‘Let’s see, he was the-no, that was the other one-or was he? Oh, never mind. They’re all the same, anyway. I think he was an aspiring actor who thought Estelle could help his ambitions. When she finally saw through him she tossed him out. She was in love with someone else by then.’
‘You’re very cool about it all. Doesn’t all this “eternal love” affect you?’
‘Eternal love?’ She seemed to consider this. ‘Would that be eternal love as in he tried to take every penny she had, or as in he haunted the set, throwing a fit whenever she had a love scene, or as in-?’
‘All right, I get the picture. Evidently the male sex doesn’t impress you.’
‘However did you guess?’
‘But what about your own experience? There must have been one or two brave enough to defy the rockets you fire at them?’
Her lips twitched. ‘Of course. I don’t look at them unless they’re brave enough to do that.’
‘That’s the first of your requirements, is it? Courage?’
‘Among other things. But even that’s overrated. The man I married was a professional sportsman, a skier who could do the most death-defying stuff. The trouble was, it was all he could do, so in the end he was boring too.’
‘You’re married?’ he asked slowly.
‘Not any more,’ she said in a tone of such devout thankfulness that he was forced to smile.
‘What happened? Was it very soon after our meeting?’
‘No, I went to college and studied hard. It was the same college where my grandfather had been a professor, and it was wonderful because people couldn’t care less that I was a film star’s daughter, but they were impressed that I was his granddaughter. I had to do him credit. I studied to improve my knowledge of the Greek language, learned the history, passed exams. We were going to come here and explore together, but then he and my grandmother both died. It’s not the same without him. I so much wanted to make him proud of me.’
She hesitated, while a shadow crossed her face, making him lean forward.
‘What is it?’ he asked gently.
‘Oh-nothing.’
‘Tell me,’ he persisted, still gentle.
‘I was just remembering how much I loved them and they loved me. They needed me, because I was all that was left to them after their son died. They liked Estelle, but she wasn’t part of them as I was.’
‘Wasn’t your mother jealous of your closeness to them?’
Petra shook her head. ‘She’s a loving mother, in her way, but I’ve never been vital to her as I was to them.’
‘How sad,’ he said slowly.
‘Not really. As long as you have someone who needs you, you can cope with the others who don’t.’
At that moment all the others who hadn’t needed her seemed to be there in the shadows, starting with Estelle, always surrounded by people whose job it was to minister to her-hairdressers, make-up artists, lawyers, psychologists, professional comfort-givers, lovers, husbands. Whatever she wanted, there was always someone paid to provide it.
She was sweet-tempered and had showered her daughter with a genuine, if slightly theatrical affection, but when a heavy cold had forced Petra to miss one of her weddings- Fourth? Fifth?-she’d shrugged, said, “Never mind” and merely saved her an extra large piece of cake.
Petra had soon understood. She was loved, but she wasn’t essential. She’d tried to take it lightly, saying that it didn’t matter, because she’d found that this was one way to cope. Eventually it had become the way she coped with the whole of life.
But it had mattered. There, always at the back of her mind, had been the little sadness, part of her on the lookout for someone to whom she was vitally necessary. Her. Not the money and glamour with which her mother’s
