‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘I went to live with them after my parents divorced.’
‘But not immediately after?’
The question jolted through her like an arc of electricity, touching sensitive nerve-endings that should have been healed. Not that she was going to let him see that.
‘No,’ she agreed. But she couldn’t look at him as she answered. Instead she had to look across the graveyard—so symbolic, in its way, as a graveyard of her own longings and hopes which the end of her parents’ marriage had brought about.
‘At first you lived with your father. Wasn’t that rather unusual for a girl of eighteen? To choose to live with her father rather than her mother?’
Louise didn’t question how he knew so much about her. The village priest had requested a history of her family from her when she had written to him with regard to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes. Knowing the habits of this very close Sicilian community, she suspected enquiries would have also been made via contacts in London.
The thought of that was enough to have fully armed anxiety springing to life inside her stomach. If she couldn’t fulfil her grandparents’ final wishes because this man chose to withhold his permission because of her…
Automatically Louise bowed her head, her golden hair catching the stray beams of sunlight penetrating the green darkness of the cypress-shaded graveyard.
It had been an unwelcome shock, and the last thing she had felt prepared for, to see him, and not the priest as she had anticipated. With every look he gave her, every silence that came before another question, she was tensing her nerves against the blow she knew he could deliver. Her desire to turn and flee was so strong that she was trembling inside as she fought to resist it. Fleeing would be as pointless as trying to outrun the deathly outpouring from a volcano. All it would achieve would be a handful of heart-pounding, stomach-churning, sickening minutes of time in which to imagine the awfulness of her fate. Better, surely, to stand and defy it and at least have her self-respect intact.
All the same, she had to grit her perfectly straight, neat white teeth very hard to stop herself giving vent to her real feelings. It was none of his business that she and her mother had never been close, with her mother always being far more concerned with her next affair or party than having a conversation with her daughter. In fact she’d been absent more than present throughout Louise’s life. When her mother had announced she was leaving for Palm Springs and a new life Louise had honestly felt very little other than a faint relief. Her father, of course, was rather a different story—his constant presence served as an endless reminder of her own failings.
It was a moment before she could bring herself to say distantly, ‘I was in my final year of school in London when my parents divorced, so it made sense for me to move in with my father. He had taken a service apartment in London, since the family house was being sold and my mother was planning to move to Palm Springs.’
His questions were far too intrusive for her liking, but she knew that to antagonise this man—even if she was coming to resent him more with every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made into the protective shield she had wrapped around her past—would prove to be counterproductive. She was determined not to do so.
All that mattered about this interview was getting this arrogant, hateful overlord’s agreement to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes in accordance with their wishes. Once that was done she could give vent to her own feelings. Only then could she finally put the past behind her and live her own life, in the knowledge that she had discharged the almost sacred trust that had been left to her.
Louise swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her mouth. How she had changed from that turbulent eighteen-year-old who had been so governed by emotion and who had paid such a savage price.
She still hated even thinking about those stormy years, when she’d witnessed the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the resulting fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That fall-out had seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents’ two separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where her father’s new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which, according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought such shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives they were building for themselves.
Looking back, it was no wonder that her parents had considered her to be such a difficult child. Was it because her father’s work had made him an absent father that she had tried so desperately to win his love? Or had she known instinctively at some deep atavistic level even then that her conception and with it his marriage to her mother had always been bitterly regretted and resented by him?