Cathy looked anxiously at him. Surely he wasn’t going to believe any of this fairy story! ‘Darling, it isn’t true, it can’t be! I’m only worried because Dad’s reaction to her was so over the top. Sending those men down here to get her, and the car crash . . . I’d swear the driver tried to run her down, someone is trying to kill her, I saw that with my own eyes, and . . . well, that does make you wonder how much else is true . . . but it can’t be, the idea’s crazy.’
She stopped, realizing that Paul wasn’t listening to her. His arms had dropped. He moved away, walked to the couch. ‘Her name – what did you say her name was?’
‘Sophie. Sophie Narodni.’
‘Narodni,’ he repeated in a voice she did not recognize, a deep, thick voice which frightened her.
Cathy looked up at him, fear in her eyes. ‘Yes, she’s Czech, she says she comes from a village near Prague. Her mother worked for my mother years and years ago, when my parents were living there. My father was in the diplomatic, remember? It all happened in 1968 – remember, that was when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. Maybe that’s what gave her the idea? When people started talking about Dad as a future president she may have dreamt up this story about my parents losing their own baby, and giving my mother money to let them take her little girl away with them as their own.’
‘They bought you?’
‘No, of course not – Dad wouldn’t do a thing like that! For God’s sake, Paul! Think about it! OK, she tells a good story. The dates all fit, and she makes it sound plausible because she believes it herself, I don’t dispute she believes it. She isn’t a liar, but she has to be wrong. It must be a lie, Paul. Dad wouldn’t have cheated Grandee that way, and my mother wouldn’t have wanted somebody else’s child. I mean, she wasn’t sick then, she got sick later.’
Cathy hated to admit, even to herself, that her mother was not just sick, but on the verge of senility and getting worse all the time, that there was no hope of a recovery, only a slow slide into the dark.
Paul was still standing by the couch, staring down fixedly at Sophie, his back to Cathy. She saw his face in profile; every bone in it clenched, his skin ashen, his body as tense as a coiled spring.
She had expected reassurance and comfort from him, but she wasn’t getting it. Paul wasn’t taking it the way she had thought he would. What was he thinking?
She was suddenly afraid. She had been so sure he loved her for herself. Before she met him she had known a lot of men who were really only interested in the family she came from, the money she would one day inherit. She had learnt to pick them out on sight; the fortune-hunters, the creeps, the liars. Paul had been so different – he had his own money, he came from another, older culture, he knew very little about her family and what they meant in New England’s history. They had fallen in love at the same time, in the same place, for the same reasons.
Pure lust, he had said, once, laughing, and she had laughed, too, knowing he was joking. They had wanted each other on sight, it was true, but they had shared far more than that. They had simply known each other with total intimacy on first sight: body, heart and soul, they belonged together.
That was what she had believed. Now for the first time she wondered . . . did he really love her? What if she lost it all – the family background, the money, the social status.
What then? Would she lose Paul too?
10
Steve and Vladimir lost their way on unlit, winding English roads between the motorway and the village they were looking for, following signposts which took them round and round, it seemed to them, in ever-decreasing circles. When they finally, and quite by accident, found the right road and drove into the village, it was quiet and still. The police, the fire brigade, the people had all gone, the street was dark and the villagers had either gone to the pub or gone home. Only the burnt-out, blackened metal of the car remained to give evidence of what had happened; it still lay under the tree, the branches of which had been turned into charcoal. As Steve parked on the forecourt of the Green Man both men leaned forward to stare.
‘Somebody had a nasty accident,’ Vladimir murmured. ‘I guess they don’t survive. Nobody got out of that alive, huh?’
Steve didn’t answer. Pale and suddenly haggard, he leapt out of the car and ran towards the pub. He had left the car-keys in the ignition, so before following him Vladimir removed them and locked the car. It might only be a hire car but there was no point in leaving it unlocked right outside a bar where some drunk might find it.
The brightly lit pub made Vladimir laugh aloud. ‘I have seen thi
s place on an English Christmas card!’ he muttered to himself. ‘All it needs is some snow, and maybe Santa Claus and his reindeer on the roof. Is real, I wonder? Or another bit of Disneyland?’
He found Steve in the oak-panelled bar, which was crowded with people drinking, the air rich with a strong smell of malt and hops, bitter English beer, which Vladimir inhaled with interest – he must try their beer while he was here although he didn’t expect it to be as good as his home-brewed local beer or lager. Until Steve appeared the room had been rocking with noise, shouting, the click of darts hitting a round board, glasses clinking – Vladimir had heard all that as he got out of the car, and heard the hush that fell as Steve walked in through the door.
Now everyone was listening as the landlady answered some question Steve had asked.
‘The accident? Oh, you saw the car . . . yes, terrible, it was.’ She looked round the bar. ‘Wasn’t it?’
There was a chorus of agreement, heads nodded.
Steve said huskily, ‘It certainly looks horrific – did the driver survive?’
‘You must be kidding, dear – no, no, she was killed.’
‘She?’ Steve’s voice sounded as if he was being strangled.
The landlady gave him a sharp look but answered with a shrug. ‘Seems the driver was a woman. Someone saw her before she crashed.’
Very pale, Steve asked, ‘Do they know who she was?’
‘Not yet. The police are trying to find out. There was . . .’ She paused, grimacing with a faintly sick expression because she had rarely seen anything so terrible happen in this tiny place. Most days went by without stirring the air around them, it was hard to tell one day from the next, but it would be a long time before she forgot tonight. ‘There was nothing left, you know? To tell by, I mean. But they did find the car number plate, it flew off and wasn’t badly burnt, they’re trying to trace her from that. She was driving like a lunatic, I know that – a hundred miles an hour, I reckon. Nearly killed a young woman who’s staying here in one of my bedrooms.’