Watching her daughter as she paced the kitchen in her fury, Amber looked at Jay, her beloved husband, her best friend, who knew all there was to know about her and always had done. To Amber, the relationship, the love she shared with Jay, was perfect and what she yearned for her children to know in their own marriages. But Emerald wanted different things and, looking at her daughter now, Amber acknowledged sadly that it was not love for her husband that was driving her daughter’s fury. But that did not stop her from feeling guilty. It wasn’t hard for Amber to recognise the motivation of a woman who was prepared to destroy her son’s marriage to suit her own ends. After all, her grandmother had been very much in the same mould, trying to force her own parents apart because she had not liked Amber’s father. ‘Perhaps if Jay and Mr Melrose spoke with Alessandro’s mother—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Emerald replied. ‘She wants to end our marriage. I always knew she wouldn’t want Alessandro to marry me.’ Her face hardened. ‘But if it wasn’t for you, Mother, she wouldn’t be able to do a single thing about it.’
Emerald fumbled in her handbag, lit herself a cigarette and drew fiercely on it.
Even in her anger her daughter was beautiful, Amber acknowledged. Beautiful, but cold and hard, and knowing that increased Amber’s guilt, for wasn’t she, as Emerald had just accused her, responsible for her daughter’s personality, either through the genes she had passed on to her or the trauma of the months she had carried her, and her birth?
Was it because of those early weeks and months in her womb that Emerald seemed to have been born hating her? Was it too fanciful to think that somehow her daughter knew of how fearful Amber had been, how desperately she had wished not to have conceived her? Amber didn’t know, but she did know that the burden of her own guilt lay very heavily on her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Emerald.’
Although she was awake Emerald pretended not to hear her mother when she came into the bedroom carrying a tea tray.
‘Your father, Jean-Philippe…’ she began, sitting down on the bed.
Emerald sat upright.
‘You are not to call him that. I shall never acknowledge him as my father.’
‘I have some of his paintings, if you would like to see them. He gave them into my safekeeping. They should be seen, not shut away in an attic. They are very good. When you were little, Robert did think you might have inherited his talent; you used to love to draw, do you remember?’
‘There is nothing of that…that peasant in me, do you hear me? Nothing. No, don’t touch me,’ she demanded when Amber reached out to take her hand. ‘I shall never forgive you for that. No one else must ever know about this. Have you…did you…? Thank God you aren’t a Catholic, otherwise I suppose the whole world would know you’d gone snivelling to confess what you’d done. You’re that kind.’
She should rebuke her, Amber knew, remind her that she was her mother, and Emerald herself not yet even twenty-one, but she couldn’t. Emerald had always treated her with disdain, her strength of will magnifying everything she said and did.
‘If Alessandro loves you…’ she began hesitantly, wanting to find a way to help.
‘Don’t be stupid. It isn’t Alessandro who matters, it’s his mother. How dare she have me investigated, poking and prying? How stupid you were, Mother, not to have made sure that no one could ever find out. And now it’s me who has to pay the price for your stupidity.’
Amber was too distressed to defend herself and, knowing there was no use in trying to talk to Emerald, she stood up and left the room.
Emerald sat stony-faced and silent in the first-class compartment of the train taking her back to London. Somehow, someday, she would pay back Alessandro’s mother for what she was doing to her–and with interest. She looked down, a speck of something on her coat catching her eye. A tiny spot of brilliant colour, as brilliant as a St-Tropez summer sky against the cool beige of her outfit…She looked at it and then gave a cold hard smile as she brushed it away.
Back at Denham, Amber was sitting back on her heels in the dusty attic, her face covered with her hands as she wept.
‘Oh, no, Jay. Oh, no!’
Shortly after their return to Denham, having seen a sullen Emerald off on the train to London, Amber had had a sudden impulse to go up to the attic and look at Jean-Philippe’s paintings.
‘Perhaps to reassure myself that neither he nor I was as dreadful as Emerald implied,’ she had told Jay when she explained to him what she was going to do.
Naturally Jay had gone with her. He was anxious about his wife. She and Emerald had always had a difficult relationship but he wasn’t sure they could recover from this.
She hadn’t looked at the paintings for a very long time; there had been no need. To Amber they had always been something she held in trust, the physical memory of the man who had painted them with such passion and skill.
The disturbed dust had told its own tale, as had the packing case, which had been left carelessly open.
The knife marks that scored deep into the paint and the canvas had been deliberately cruel and destructive.
‘Emerald…’ Jay exhaled as he stared at the damaged canvas. ‘How did she know they were here?’
‘I told her. It’s my fault. I thought…I thought she might find it comforting to know, to see how good he was…Oh, Jay…’
‘It’s only the two canvases,’ he tried to comfort her, as he checked through the packing case. ‘She obviously didn’t touch the others.’
As Jay looked at the now scarred and knifed flesh of the young figure in the painting and then at the face of his wife, who still looked so remarkably like the girl she had been then, he felt an anger towards Emerald that he had rarely experienced in his life.