‘Just one?’
Lily came out of the house carrying a tray. She was wearing a simple white blouse with little cap sleeves and a short cotton skirt strewn with daisies that made her look fresh and pure and sweet. Tristan felt his heart lurch.
He had to do this for her.
‘Yes,’ he said, tersely. ‘Just one. Nico. He’s ten years younger than me. He works in a charity based in Madrid.’
Miss Squires was writing everything down, and Tristan was glad that her eyes were directed at the paper in front of her rather than at him.
‘Not in the bank?’
‘No.’ Tristan had made sure of that. He’d sacrificed finishing his degree and doing something he wanted in life to make sure of that.
‘What about your parents?’ Miss Squires said, clearly deciding that Nico was of little interest. ‘Are you close to them?’
Across the table Lily’s eyes met his. They were soft and sunlight dappled, and they reached out to him. Looking into them, holding on, he said tonelessly, ‘I see them quite often. I work alongside my father.’
Miss Squires looked up. ‘That’s not really what I’m asking.’
Gently Lily placed a pale blue pottery mug of tea in front of him. Tristan rubbed his fingers wearily across his eyes. ‘Why do you want to know this?
‘This is the next part of the process, Mr Romero,’ said Miss Squires slightly archly. ‘I think you’ve done the basic induction days, where you’ve heard a bit about some of the issues faced by the children in the adoption system?’
Tristan tried to keep the grimace from his face as he remembered the three grim Saturdays spent in a community centre in North London being told about the physical effects on babies born to mothers addicted to drugs or alcohol, the mental effects of neglect, violence or abuse.
Areas he was pretty much expert in already. At times he had felt like getting up and giving the talk himself.
‘Well,’ the social worker continued, with a small shake of her head at Lily’s offer of sugar, ‘this is the time when we find out more about you. About what kind of person you are, which will help us match you to a child. We feel that the experiences people had when they were children play a crucial role in defining what kind of parents they’ll end up becoming.’
No kidding.
‘It’s important to be as honest as you can—things have a habit of coming out further down the line anyway. Were you close to your mother, would you say?’
This must be how it feels to stand on the gallows, thought Tristan bleakly. This realisation that there’s no longer any possibility of running or hiding. ‘Not really,’ he said stiffly. ‘My mother’s only close relationship is with alcohol, and I was sent to boarding school in England when I was eight.’
Behind her glasses the social worker blinked. ‘How did you feel about that?’
‘Absolutely delighted.’
Miss Squires looked deeply shocked, as if he’d just admitted to a fondness for tor turing kittens. ‘Really? So you’re in favour of sending children away to be educated in impersonal institutions, away from the family?’
He met her eyes steadily. ‘Yes, if the family is like mine was.’
Beneath the table Lily found his hand and took it in hers. The sunlight filtering through the cherry tree made her hair shimmer and turned her skin to honeyed gold. For a moment there was no sound apart from birdsong and the distant drone of an aeroplane in the cornflower-blue sky above.
‘Could you explain that a bit more?’
Dios, was she never going to give up? Panic was beginning to close in on him, like a cloth coming down over his face, making it difficult to breathe, difficult to think. The tranquil garden with the cherry tree and the sound of birds seemed suddenly unreal, insubstantial and all he could see was the darkness inside himself.
Lily’s hand was the only thing an choring him to reality. He felt her fingers tighten around his as the darkness sucked him down.
He laughed, and even to his own ears it was a horrible, harsh sound. ‘My father is the eleventh Duke of Tarraco, and a direct descendent of one of the first familiares—collaborators of the Spanish Inquisition. That should tell you something. My family rose to prominence and gained wealth and favour from the royal court thanks to their fondness for the rack and the thumbscrew. Cruelty is a family trait.’
‘Are you saying that your father was cruel to you, Mr Romero?’ Miss Squires persisted.
‘Of course not,’ Tristan replied with deep, drawling irony. ‘It wasn’t cruelty. No—every blow, every lash of the belt, every stroke of the whip was for our own good. He wasn’t being cruel to us, he was simply doing his duty, forging us into proper Romero men, making sure he passed on the legacy of violence and brutality to us, just as his father had passed it on to him.’
Lily’s hand. Holding his. Keeping him from the edge. A part of his mind stayed fixed on that while he continued, almost conversationally, ‘The Banco Romero was initially founded to process the money confiscated from victims of the Inquisition. In fact,’ he drawled coldly, ‘my family now own a set of priceless jewels that once belonged to someone that one of our distinguished ancestors had executed for heresy.’
Lily’s face was pale, stricken, reflecting all the suffering he had taught himself not to show.
‘The Romero jewels,’ she whispered.
Tristan’s smile was glacial. ‘Exactly. A symbol of our corruption and guilt.’
‘That’s why you didn’t want me to have them?’
Adrenaline was coursing through him and the chasm gaped before him, dark and deep and full of horror. He had to stay strong to stop himself slipping down into it. Pulling his hand from hers he shrugged. ‘Yes. And because I can’t look at them without remembering the night when my father ripped the earrings out of my mother’s ears for some comment that she’d made over dinner that he considered disrespectful. So you see, it wasn’t only me and my brothers who bore the brunt of it…’
His throat constricted suddenly, cutting off the terrible litany of memories, and Tristan brought his fist up to his forehead in a jerky, helpless movement. Lily had shifted forwards to the edge of her seat so that she was facing him, both her hands folded around his.
‘Brothers?’ Miss Squires enquired. Tristan felt his blood turn to ice as she glanced down at the paper she’d been writing on. ‘I thought you only had one?’
He had to hand it to her, Tristan thought dully, dropping his head into his hands for a moment. She’d said that the truth had a habit of coming out. He lifted his head and looked straight at the social worker with a bitter smile.
‘I do now. But once there were three of us. My older brother, Emilio was the true Romero heir. It should have been he who inherited the title and the position in the company.’
‘What happened to him?’ Lily asked in a whisper.
‘He killed himself the day before his twenty-first birthday.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘HE COULDN’T take it any more, you see. The pressure of being the Romero heir and the position in the bank, so he—’
Tristan’s voice sounded as if he had swal lowed broken glass. Numb with horror, Lily stumbled to her feet so that her chair fell backwards. ‘Tristan, stop!’ she said in a low wail of anguish, going to stand behind him and sliding her arms around his shoulders, trying to hold all of him. ‘Please, stop now…you don’t have to say any more.’
Across the table Miss Squires averted her eyes and wrote more notes.
In her arms Tristan’s body felt utterly rigid, utterly unyielding, as if she were holding a block of stone. And then very slowly he unpeeled her arms from around him and got stiffly to his feet. Standing behind him, Lily couldn’t see his face, but his voice was like black ice.
‘Sorry.’
The tense little silence that followed was broken by the ring of a mobile phone, which made them all start. Tristan stooped to take it from the pocket of his jacket that hung on the back of the chair. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, but this time all trace of emotion had left his voice and the word was perfectly bland. ‘I have to take this.’ Slipping out from the table, he walked away into the house.
Miss Squires was gathering together her sheets of paper and tucking them into a folder. ‘Well, I think we’ll leave it there for today,’ she said, tucking the folder back in her recycled hessian bag and carefully not meeting Lily’s eye. For a moment Lily almost hated her for making Tristan talk about those things. But she hated herself more. She had made him do this.
They got up and went through the kitchen and into the hallway. It was cool in here, and, after the sunlit garden, very dim. Tristan’s voice drifted down the stairs, strong, staccato, decisive. At the door Miss Squires turned to Lily with a rather forced smile. ‘Thank you for the tea, Mrs Romero, and I’ll be in touch about our next meeting.’ She paused. ‘If you and your husband decide to proceed, that is.’
Outside Lily gathered up the mugs and the plate of biscuits she had laid out with such high hopes and such meticulous care. How foolish it seemed now that she had thought that biscuits and the kind of skirt she wore were important when all the time she hadn’t known anything about what really mattered. She carried the tray into the kitchen and set it down beside the salmon. The carefully chosen, stage managed salmon that had played its part to perfection, and which Miss Squires hadn’t even seemed to notice. She looked up as Tristan appeared in the doorway.