‘Luke—’ She was shocked to see the glitter of tears in his eyes, the way the skin was stretched taut across his cheekbones and jaw. God, he was hurting, and part of his pain was because of her. By coming here like this was she making things worse for Luke and his family just for the sake of her own selfish needs? ‘Luke, I—’
‘I know...I know...you want to go in alone,’ he said, misunderstanding her inarticulate plea. He released her elbow reluctantly. ‘For God’s sake, Roz, whatever this is about, please try not to hurt her any more than she already has been. She’s going to need every ounce of hope and courage to tackle her recovery.’
There was a hot stinging in her own eyes at the irony of his plea. He didn’t know what he was asking. To have any sort of future with Luke she might have to force Peggy’s hand. And if she did she might very well lose him anyway. ‘Of course I won’t!’
She turned to go in and felt him touch her shoulder.
‘And Roz?’
‘What?’ She looked back, her chin brushing the back of his hand. Unable to resist, she tilted her head and rubbed her cheek yearningly against it, until he turned his hand over and ran his fingers down the line of her jaw to tap them on her chin.
‘I love you,’ he said huskily.
‘What?’ She was hallucinating from lack of sleep. Having a waking dream...
‘Never mind. Later. Go on...’ He flattened his hand between her shoulderblades and pushed, so that she stumbled forward, instinctively reaching out and bumping open the door. ‘I’ll be waiting for you...’
A long, slow, painfully intense half-hour later he was true to his word, getting up from a hard wooden chair in the small, sterile waiting room at the end of the hallway as she trudged across the wavering floor towards him.
‘Well?’
She closed her dry, gritty eyes, unwilling to face the dream that had become a tangled nightmare of lies.
‘I have to go.’
‘Go? Go where?’ His voice sounded as if it was coming from the end of a long tunnel.
‘Home.’
‘Home?’
‘To Auckland... my apartment... I have an audition to study for...’ Damn it, she was going to take that Shakespearian role! she thought, trying to summon her enthusiasm. Peter was gone...no more stalker to distract her stage persona, to paralyse her vocal cords with nameless fears. Her career had taken the place of children in her life; now she would stretch it over the gaping hole left by Luke. She would be the fiercest, most bloodthirstily ambitious, most utterly wretched Lady Macbeth in the history of the Scottish play!
There was a long silence and she opened her eyes, to be confronted with the intense black conflagration in his.
‘What happened in there?’
She tried to smile, failed and settled for a shrug. ‘Nothing. We talked. It’s over—I don’t have to feel any more horrible guilt or responsibility on Peggy’s behalf...she said she’d been having chest twinges for some time but had put them down to indigestion. As for the rest...well...’ She found a wall at her shoulder and leaned gratefully against it. Why did her legs seem not to work? ‘It was just as she told you...’
Peggy’s struggle with language had reminded her uneasily of those terrible minutes in the hotel room and Rosalind had been no more proof against the agitated pleading of her eyes and the working of her distorted face than she had been on the last occasion.
Peggy was deathly afraid of losing her family and, trapped by her disability, more vulnerable than ever to her deeply rooted feelings of shame. She had found Peter’s body, after calling in at his flat on the way to the hotel, and, as Rosalind had surmised, had fled in shock and panic. But she was under the impression that she had managed to redeem her wickedness by blurting everything out in the confused moments before she’d finally lost consciousness.
Rosalind had tactfully glossed over the facts, hoping that the poor woman need never know of the true circumstances surrounding the discovery of her son’s body. Her grief over his death was muted by a shamed sense of relief and, true to the spirit which had characterised her behaviour all along, Peggy was desperate to have the past swept safely back under the carpet where it belonged.
Rosalind hated it but she had been too exhausted to remember her rehearsed arguments, even if she could have brought herself to unleash them on the fragile bundle of humanity on the bed. She had the feeling that in years to come Peggy would continue to struggle with her conscience and ultimately pay the price of suppressing her unresolved grief.
‘And where does that leave us?’ Luke broke harshly into her anguished thoughts by placing a hand on the wall beside her head and dipping his face to force her to look at him.
‘Us?’ She was still an actress, wasn’t she? Maybe that was all she would ever be as far as Luke was concerned... but at least she could be the best.
Rosalind summoned all her remaining courage and gave a tinkling laugh. ‘Oh, Luke, don’t be so intense. There is no us...that was just holiday fever...spiced up with intrigue and all our suspicions about each other. It’s a shame that it had to end in the way it did, but maybe it was for the best, because we’re back in the real world now and I really don’t think we have much in common—’
She yelped as he shot out his other hand to slam it against the wall. ‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ he hammered out. ‘I didn’t chase you halfway across the world to be fobbed off with your flighty-actress routine! I told you before you walked in there that I love you. That meant something to you—I could see it; stop trying to deny it, damn it—I love you!’
‘Maybe you think you do,’ she said desperately, aware of the sick woman hovering like a spectre between them.
Maybe in time, as she got stronger and better able to cope, Peggy would relent, but what if she didn’t? Rosalind imagined loving Luke, sharing his life, coming into contact with Peggy and Don, always walking on a knife-edge, aware that one careless word might sow the seeds of destruction in his adoptive parents’ marriage. She would stifle. In love, as in everything else, Rosalind was an all-or-nothing person. She would love freely and completely or not at all.