‘Yes,’ Amber agreed.
Still keeping her face averted from her mother, Emerald continued, ‘They resemble him then, do they? The painter?’
Amber exhaled, flinching from the raw bitterness of the way Emerald pronounced the words.
‘Not really. Luc actually looked very like Robert, probably because he had Robert’s mannerisms. Jean-Philippe’s hair was dark but so were his eyes; Luc, like Robbie, had blue eyes. Luc adored Robert and copied everything he did.’
Emerald, who was watching Robbie coming towards her, flanked on one side by Jay, on the other by Drogo, tensed abruptly as she saw that Robbie was walking with exactly the same stride as Drogo.
A surge of conflicting emotions rushed through her.
‘Mummy, do I have to go back to London?’ Robbie demanded as the three of them reached the spot where Amber and Emerald stood. ‘Only Uncle Drogo is going to do lots of exciting things, like going for walks and looking for fossils and things.’
‘We can still do that in London, old chap,’ Drogo assured Robbie. ‘We could go to the Natural History Museum, if you like—’
‘Yes. And can we go to Madame Tussauds as well?’
Emerald was about to point out to Drogo that he had no right to make arrangements that included her son without asking her permission first, but before she could do so Drogo was turning to her and asking, ‘Did you drive down from London or come on the train?’
‘The train,’ she answered him in a sharp voice.
‘Then how about going back with me in the car? I was planning to drive back tomorrow anyway.’
Robbie’s excited, ‘You mean in your new Bentley?’ warned Emerald that there was no point in her trying to refuse. And besides, it was ridiculous of her to feel somehow that being transported back to London in the comfort of Drogo’s Bentley was something to be avoided.
Chapter Forty-Eight
‘Oh, c’mon, Janey, it was nothing really.’
It was ten o’clock on Monday morning and they were in Janey’s office. Janey had barely slept or eaten since she had found Cindy and Charlie in bed together, despite John’s kind efforts to persuade her to do so. Her head still ached from all the crying she had done, but Cindy, in contrast, looked not just relaxed about the whole thing but almost amused.
‘Nothing?’ Janey retorted, her voice rising. ‘How can you call being in bed with my boyfriend nothing?’
‘Because it was. OK, so Charlie and I bumped into one another on Friday night, and I ended
up going back to his place with him, and the one thing led to another and we went to bed together, but so what? I don’t know what you’re getting so uptight about. That handsome guy you were with on Saturday is a friend of yours, right, and I’ll bet the two of you have shared a bed when the mood’s taken you.’
‘No, we haven’t,’ Janey denied. John was good-looking and kind, but somehow she had never thought of him in that way before. He had always just been John.
‘More fool you then,’ Cindy told her. She shrugged. ‘Why don’t we just forget Saturday, Janey? Personally I think you’re making a fuss about nothing, and making a bit of a fool of yourself as well, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I can agree to that,’ Janey snapped at her. ‘I certainly made a fool of myself over Charlie.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me and Charlie. Charlie is yours. What happened meant nothing to either of us, and if you’d just calm down and stop acting like a provincial, and remember instead that this is London and—’
‘Charlie is not mine and I don’t want him to be. In fact, I don’t ever want to see him again.’
Cindy lit herself a cigarette and drew slowly on it before exhaling and telling Janey dismissively, ‘You’re getting things totally out of proportion.’
‘I find my partner in bed with my boyfriend and you say I’m getting things out of proportion? You’d obviously…had sex.’
‘Yeah, well, people do. So what? It didn’t mean anything.’
‘Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you but it certainly meant something to me,’ Janey told her.
Cindy gave a small contemptuous laugh. ‘I hadn’t realised that you were so behind the times, Janey. No one bothers about a bit of sex between friends. Everyone does it. Poor Charlie, you’ve really upset him.’
Cindy was enjoying making fun of her, Janey suspected. The partner she had admired had become someone she didn’t very much like.