Alex appeared briefly at breakfast, his face tight and restrained, and then closed himself in his study with terse instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. ‘Is everything all right, Miss Fabia?’ Mary asked anxiously as she bustled in with fresh coffee mid-morning as Fabia sat idly looking through a stack of magazines in the main drawing-room.
‘I suppose so, Mary,’ Fabia said as lightly as she could, ‘but to be honest I’m bored out of my mind without something to do. Alex is busy and Isabella is still sleeping and I’m just not used to doing nothing.’ She smiled wryly at the little housekeeper. ‘I’d never make one of the idle rich, would I?’
‘I don’t know about that, Miss Fabia, but you could do the flowers for the party tonight if you really do want something to do. Jenny is rushed off her feet with the amount of cooking there’s still to do and I’m tied up with a million and one last-minute details. It’d really be a help if you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Would it?’ Fabia smiled delightedly. ‘I’d love to. Lead me to them.’ Anything to keep her mind from the destructive circle it seemed intent on following, she thought gratefully.
By mid-afternoon all the preparations were complete and with Isabella installed in the drawing-room ready to greet the first guests Fabia hurried upstairs to change. She hadn’t seen Alex since morning. He had ordered sandwiches and coffee in the study at lunchtime and she understood he had paid a brief visit to his grandmother’s room before lunch, but apart from that he was incommunicado.
It was as she was finishing putting the last touches to her make-up that the light knock sounded at the door, and, thinking it was Mary or Christine with a message from Isabella, she called a cheerful ‘come in’ as she turned round on the tiny dressing-table stool.
‘I wanted a word with you before we go downstairs.’ Alex stood in the doorway, devastatingly handsome in an off-white lounge suit with pale blue shirt and tie, his long hair slicked back and his golden-brown eyes glinting strangely.
‘Oh...’ She stared at him mesmerised as he walked towards her, stopping a foot or so away and leaning against the wall as he took in her slender shape in the dark wine cocktail dress she had decided to wear for the evening’s gaiety. She had twisted her hair into a casual knot on the top of her head, leaving several silky floating strands of hair wisping about her neck, the diamond pendant lying in the hollow of her throat like a piercingly beautiful teardrop.
‘I think an apology is in order.’ For a crazy moment she thought he was asking that she apologise to him, and then he cleared his throat slowly and spoke again. ‘I’m sorry for acting in such a...cavalier way last night, Fabia. It was unforgivable and it won’t happen again. I thought when I brought you here that you would understand—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘That you would see—’ He stopped again and swore softly. ‘Suffice it to say I won’t be troubling you with my unwelcome intentions again. OK?’
It wasn’t, but she couldn’t explain to him what she didn’t understand herself, and she merely nodded slowly as he inclined his head towards her and strode from the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. She took a long deep breath before turning slowly on the delicate little stool and looking at her reflection in the long, ornate mirror. That was that, then. She had sensed that he had reached some sort of decision. Maybe he would ask her to leave early tomorrow, but then how could he explain such action to Isabella? She shut her eyes for a moment and swayed back and forwards with her arms tight around her waist as a shaft of pure agony pierced her heart. She didn’t want to leave him. The thought shocked her with its fierceness and she opened bruised blue eyes to stare reproachfully at the pale, slim girl in the mirror. ‘Don’t be so pathetic,’ she said softly. ‘You go down there now and you act like you’ve never acted before. None of this is real, it never was.’
As the
guests began to arrive she was aware, as she stood by Isabella’s side, that she was waiting for just one beautiful face in the throng that was slowly filling the huge house. She saw the children before she saw Susan, Gemma looking like a little angel in a frothy party dress of white velvet and Jeremy trying to act the man in a small cream suit with a little red dicky-bow. They looked delightful...and they were, she thought miserably. How someone like Susan came to have such warm, natural children she would never know. The answer to that was revealed later as she watched Susan’s parents attend to their grandchildren’s needs while Susan floated about in an elegant swirl of dark green silk, looking as though she had spent all day getting ready—which she probably had, Fabia thought tightly.
‘Their father adored them,’ Isabella said softly in her ear at one point early into the party as she watched the children standing dutifully by the side of their grandparents, their small hands clasped in those of the grown-ups. ‘They were the only bright spots in the poor man’s life once he’d taken Susan on,’ she carried on quietly. ‘She made poor William’s life hell.’
‘Did she?’ Fabia looked sharply at the old lady, who smiled at her understandingly.
‘Anything in trousers, my dear,’ Isabella said blithely, unaware of how incongruous the term sounded on her lips. ‘Poor William was sent to an early grave.’
‘She called him poor William,’ Fabia said thoughtfully, making up her mind in that instant that she was going to stand no nonsense from Susan tonight. Or any other time, if it came to it!
‘Crocodile tears, my dear,’ the old lady said firmly. ‘The girl’s bad all through.’ Fabia glanced at the tiny figure affectionately. Like a true Italian Isabella loved and hated with equal passion; there was nothing lukewarm about her emotions even at her great age.
Within minutes Alex appeared at her side and remained close by for the next hour or two although Fabia got the distinct impression that it was more to further Isabella’s pipe-dreams than any wish to be near to her. She couldn’t quite place what was missing in that cool gold gaze, but something had gone and she felt the loss.
It was when they were called into the huge dining-room for the buffet tea that she heard the middle-aged couple in front of her discussing Susan, and once Alex’s name had been mentioned she was powerless to walk away although she knew instinctively that she wouldn’t like what she was about to hear.
‘Such sweet children, after all, and dear Alex appears to love them dearly,’ the overdressed matron on the right was gushing enthusiastically, her mauve-tinted hair clashing horribly with the shocking-pink dress she had squeezed her ample figure into.
‘Oh, I know...’ The other woman was more conserva-tively dressed but equally vehement in her love of gossip. ‘It would be so nice for Susan to be married again and the little ones to have a daddy, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled a slow smile. ‘After all,’ she whispered in a loud hiss, ‘it’s plain they’ve been more than friends for years. Susan is never off the doorstep when Alex is home.’
‘Oh, my dear, you know the story of course,’ the ‘pink’ lady said in tones that stated clearly she knew her friend didn’t and that she was going to enjoy immensely the telling of it. ‘About Alex and Susan, I mean?’
‘No...?’ The other woman leant forward eagerly, her eyes bright.
‘Well, I have it on good authority that before Susan met William she was, well, you know, with Alex. They were going to be married, so the story goes, and then the next minute she ups and takes poor William instead. No one could understand it at the time but now it looks as though it could all turn out all right in the end, doesn’t it?’
‘But how long ago—?’
Fabia turned abruptly and left the two women to their prattling, noticing as she did so that the focus of their tittle-tattle had joined Susan’s parents, lifting a child on to each knee as he smiled at something Susan’s father was saying. As she expected Susan homed in like a nuclear missile, face aglow with triumph as she glanced up and saw Fabia watching the cosy little scene.
The evening deteriorated rapidly from that point. When Isabella retired to bed shortly after everyone had finished eating, Susan became a veritable octopus, arms wrapped round some part of Alex’s anatomy at every opportunity. Fabia had noticed that the lovely brunette was a little wary of Isabella, probably having felt the lash of her tongue on more than one occasion, she surmised, but with the old lady gone she let her natural boldness have free rein, although Alex seemed quite oblivious to the pathetic display which began to make Fabia feel slightly sick.
She endured the travesty of a party for another hour or so and then as the clock struck eleven discreetly slipped away from the drawing-room where the main body of people had gathered, escaping to her room as quickly as she could and heaving a long sigh of relief as she shut the door behind her.
She wanted to scream and shout and lie down and drum her heels on the floor to banish the pain that was threatening to tear her in two, but in the end she did none of those things. Instead she ran a hot bath and soaked for a good hour in the warm comfort of the silky water before slipping into bed just after midnight, immensely relieved now she had had time to think that she hadn’t given way to her natural feminine impulse to enter into a kind of contest and had emerged from the evening with self-respect intact.
She didn’t know what time it was that Alex woke her, but was suddenly aware of being harshly pulled out of sleep by a hard, furious hand shaking her shoulder at the same time as his clipped voice sounded in her ear. ‘Wake up, young lady! You’ve got some explaining to do.’