Like a river dammed from its original course and now returning to it, feelings, emotions and awareness were starting to flow back over dry, parched land that was now struggling to cope with the flood, whilst the other course fought desperately to hold on to its supremacy. As always when his emotions seemed to threaten him, Marco took refuge in practical action, going to the cabinet in the sitting room and opening it, pouring Lily a small glass of brandy which he took back to her, instructing her, ‘Drink this.’ When she hesitated, he assured her, ‘You’re in shock and it will help you.’
Nodding her head, Lily tilted the glass to her lips. The fiery liquid burned its way down her throat, warming her stomach, leaving her feeling slightly light-headed.
Why had she told Marco what she had? She wished desperately that she hadn’t, but it was too late to deny her admission now. She stood up abruptly, ignoring the dizzy feeling that instantly seized her as she paced the floor at the end of the bed, lost, trapped in a world of fear and despair.
Marco felt the full weight of the enormity of what she had said to him. She was carrying a terrible burden of emotional pain. He could see that now. A burden of pain he had reinforced by his cruel misjudgement of her. Like a blind man trying to seek his way in unfamiliar territory he tried to understand what he should do—for her, not for himself, because it was her need that mattered to him now. Comforting her was far more important to him than protecting his own emotional distance. He wanted to help her, he recognised. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to love her. Love her? He wanted to love her.
Quickly he pushed the admission away. There were things that Lily needed to say. Things she had kept locked away inside herself for a very long time, and he knew all about the darkness that could cause.
‘Tell me what happened, Lily,’ he urged her gently. ‘Tell me about him … Anton.’
Lily looked at him, as though properly registering his presence for the first time. ‘I can’t,’ she answered him. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You think I’m a liar.’
Her words struck like a blow against his conscience.
‘I will understand and I will believe you,’ he promised her, adding quietly, ‘You said it was your father who introduced you to him?’
‘Yes. Anton owns one of the magazines that used to commission my father. He used to come to my father’s studio.’
‘And that was where you met him?’
‘Yes. I didn’t like him right from the start. There was something about him.’ Lily closed her eyes, but she couldn’t blot out the memories and the images she didn’t want to see. ‘He knew that I didn’t like him. I could tell. It amused him. He enjoyed … he liked frightening me. And I was afraid of him. He made me afraid of him. Just by looking at me sometimes. I used to have nightmares about him looking at me.’
Marco swallowed down on the angry pity her words had produced.
‘What about your parents? Your mother …?’
‘My mother was dead by then, and my stepmother had left my father, taking Rick with her. I was at boarding school, so most of the time I was … I didn’t have to see him. It was just during the school holidays, when I was staying with my father.’
‘Didn’t you tell him how you felt?’
‘I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have understood. My father … Well, you heard Melanie. He never really wanted children.’
Maybe not, but having had them surely he must have accepted that it was his duty as a father to protect his child? Marco thought grimly, but he didn’t want to upset Lily even more by saying so.
As though she sensed what he was thinking, and his criticism of her father, she told him quickly, ‘They were friends—and not just that. My father worked for Anton. As you know, my father was a photographer. He worked for several upmarket magazines, doing modelling shoots. He and the people he mixed with were very cutting edge. They lived a certain kind of lifestyle. I suppose the best way to sum it up is to say that it was a … a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle.’
‘And Anton also lived that lifestyle?’
‘Yes. He was—still is, I suppose—a very wealthy man. A very important man in the fashion world. His magazine is hugely influential. Being commissioned to photograph fashion shoots for it was an accolade. It could make or break a photographer. My father lived for his work. It gave him the kind of high that other people get from drugs. He was very creative, a genius in his field, and he would get angry and impatient with people who got in the way of him fulfilling his talent.’