The Morning After

* * *

She was sitting on a rock, gazing emptily out to sea, when the skittering displacement of a pebble somewhere behind her warned her that she was no longer alone.

It was still quite early. Having surprisingly slept the sleep of the dead the night before, she had awoken just as dawn had been turning the sky from navy to blue. And on a restless urge to stop the events of the previous night from tumbling back into her head she’d got up, dressed in a simple pair of white shorts and a white T-shirt, then left her room via the French windows.

Glancing up, she saw César coming towards her. Barefoot, he moved easily across the light, pebbly ground, the solid gold bracelet of his watch glinting in the early morning light. Behind him his white-painted house stood in the shadow of a new day. Behind it stood the hill, with its thicket of trees reaching up towards a pure blue sky.

A beautiful place. Somewhere between Eden and paradise, she found herself thinking fancifully.

If César was the serpent Annie wasn’t sure what that made her.

He was dressed in a light cambric shirt and a pair of thin white cotton beach trousers rolled up a little at the ankles. His hair was contained, his face wearing the sheen of a man who had just indulged in a close shave, and he looked devastatingly attractive.

A man who stood out on his own as special.

No. Firmly she squashed what was trying to take place inside her, and looked away again. She did not want to feel anything right now.

And she did not want to see the knowledge that she knew would be written in his shrewd emerald eyes if she let her own eyes clash with them.

He came to drop down beside her. No smile, no greeting—no tension in him. He simply drew up his knees, spread them slightly, rested his deeply tanned forearms on top, and said, ‘Right. It is time for explanations, Angelica. I want to know what made you into the absolute fraud you are.’

Just like that. She smiled to herself. Guilt and remorse done with the night before, he now demanded enlightenment.

‘Looking for absolution, Mr DeSanquez?’ she asked. ‘You won’t get it, you know,’ she warned him. ‘All you will do is discover that you are just like the rest of the human race—rarely looking beyond what you’re expecting to see.’

‘And you with your carefully prepared persona did not aid that deception?’ he countered.

Annie’s shoulders moved in a careless shrug. ‘I am in the business of selling things,’ she reminded him.

‘Using your notoriety to do it.’

‘A commodity you weren’t above exploiting yourself to help sell your precious collection. Which,’ she added before he could say anything else, ‘I accept entirely as part of my job. But it never occurred to you to look beyond the façade to the real person beneath.’

‘It wasn’t merely the false image which made you the woman I saw you to be, Angelica,’ he argued. ‘There were other, far more convincing factors which did that. Alvarez, for instance,’ he prompted quietly.

‘Alvarez’, she noted. Luis Alvarez had suddenly become the detached ‘Alvarez’ instead of the more familiar ‘brother-in-law’.

She almost smiled at the irony of it, only her stiff lips would not stretch to it. Instead she reached down to gather up a handful of pebbles from the side of her rock, then told him grimly, ‘I am not going to bare my soul to you just because you’ve happened to discover my darkest secret.’

‘It was not a dark secret, Angelica,’ he countered gently. ‘It was a sad one.’

Sad. A moment’s moisture spread across her eyes then left again.

It was more than sad. It was pathetic, she thought bitterly as her mind flew back to that dark period in her life.

At sixteen years old she had to have been the most naïve female alive. A child actress with a fresh-faced, angelic image that had made people sigh when they’d seen her on their TV sets playing a role that had grown from a single ad for breakfast cereal into a three-year-long concept of how every parent would want their teenage daughter to look and behave.

The first ad had begun simply, with her sitting in a homely kitchen with the morning sunlight beaming down onto her pale gold head. She had been dressed for school in a neat lemon and white striped uniform and her face had shown the horrors that the voice-over had explained she was experiencing with the onset of her first day at a brand new school.

‘Eat up,’ her TV mother had commanded gently. ‘Things won’t look half so bad on a full stomach.’

Reluctantly she’d pulled the bowl of crunchy flakes towards her, dipped in her spoon and forced the first mouthful down; the next had not been quite so slow, the one after that almost eager. By the time she had finished the whole bowl her face had firmed, her small chin lifting determinedly, her thoughts—via the voice-over—having become more positive with each mouthful.

The next episode had shown her coming home again, buoyant, alive, rushing into the kitchen to tell her mother about her first exciting day, and all the time she’d chatted the bowl had been coming off the shelf, the crunchy-flake box out of the cupboard, milk from the fridge. Then had come the blissful silence as she’d eaten, blue eyes shining, the voice-over explaining her instant success at her new school as she’d replayed it to her bowl of cereal.

Over the next three years her crunchy cereal, via the voice-over discussions she’d had with it, had solved all her teenage problems with a lesson well learned at the end of each ad, which had earned her the nickname ‘The Angel’.

The ads had been thrown up at other teenagers as perfect examples of good moral behaviour. She had been kind to animals, old people and small children. Parents had loved her, grandparents had loved her, small children had loved her—teenagers had hated her. Which was why she’d had so few friends of her own age—that and the fact that she’d lived with an aunt who had kept her strictly to heel when she had not been working or at school.