The Unforgettable Husband

‘I was talking about the Tremount and Carla,’ she murmured very slowly. ‘I rang her while you were out. Sh-she told me you…’

Her voice trailed away. Her eyes went blank. Her father—the Bressingham, she found herself repeating. Goose-bumps began to break out all over her wet skin. Then, no, Carla and the Tremount, she corrected herself.

‘Y-you bought it,’ she continued with a perplexed frown. ‘Carla s-suddenly thinks you’re the bees-knees w-when only hours before she…’

She stopped again, frowning that perplexed look across the pool at André, who was standing taut and still and looking very pale. ‘I n-need to sit down,’ she said, and did so, stumbling over to the nearest pool chair and dropping into it.

Cold, she felt icy cold, and nothing seemed to be functioning. Heart, lungs, the blo

od in her veins—they’d gone very silent and still, as if they were gathering themselves ready for some kind of major eruption.

‘Samantha…’ That was André’s voice, she recognised as if from a great distance. There were his footsteps she could hear echoing like thunder on the hard tiled floor. ‘Cara mia, listen to me…’ And he sounded odd, rough and thick and…

‘Why is there a door locked upstairs?’ she asked him.

The footsteps stopped. She looked up, saw him standing stock-still about four feet away. ‘It’s a storeroom,’ he said. ‘I keep my personal files locked away in there…’

‘Liar,’ she said, and looked away again. He kept the door locked because it was Raoul’s room.

Raoul—!

Oh, dear God! She jerked to her feet, jarring her knee in the process so she couldn’t help but wince. André took a giant step towards her but she held him off with a trembling hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I’m not going to black out. Just don’t come near me for a minute while I…’

Once again the words dried up, flailing in a muddy pool of confusion she couldn’t quite seem to clear.

‘You’re not all right,’ he refuted hoarsely. ‘You’re beginning to—’

‘Remember—’ she finished for him. And just like that it finally happened, roaring up with the abruptness of a flickering flame sizzling in the short grasses of her memory, suddenly erupting into a column of fire.

‘Oh, my God.’ She gasped, and began shake. André, her father, Raoul, the Bressingham. ‘André,’ she murmured painfully.

And he was there, coming from behind to drop her robe about her shoulders then holding it there with hands like vices that began firmly pulling her back from the edge of the pool as if he was afraid she was going to topple right back into it.

Maybe she was about to topple. She didn’t even care. The flame of truth was a roaring column inside her head. It began leaping, flicking out long lethal fingers across huge empty gaps to ignite other memories.

‘You lied to me,’ she whispered.

‘By omission, yes.’ His deep voice confirmed.

‘You deliberately set out to cheat and deceive me.’

His hands tightened fractionally. ‘I wasn’t like that,’ he denied. ‘You were given only half the picture. The rest was—’

Without trying to listen she broke free, somewhere in the recess of her burning mind surprised that he actually allowed her to do it. She limped off towards the door that opened into the beautiful sitting room. Behind her, André followed in grim silence as she crossed the room to the walnut bureau, tried to open it and found it locked.

‘You took the key with you when you left here,’ he quietly informed her.

Key, she thought, and bent to feel around under the bureau’s base, then came back up with a fine-worked gold key stuck to the middle of a piece of sticky tape. It was a spare key, originally taped there by her mother and allowed to remain in its secret place when the beautiful piece of furniture came to Samantha. She had been fifteen years old at the time, and inconsolable with grief. But to touch the smooth walnut wood had been like making contact with her mother. She did the same thing now, gently stroking the wood and immediately feeling that special sensation.

Then tears flooded into her eyes, because she suddenly realised she didn’t have a single thing like this to remind her of her father. Not any more anyway. André had taken it all away from her.

Holding back the tears, she concentrated on fitting the key into the pretty ornate lock and easing back the roll-top lid. It slid into its housing with a smooth familiarity that clutched at her heart.

Inside the bureau were more memories. Precious, special, deeply personal memories slotted neatly into a row of finely worked cubby-holes. Letters, birthday cards, photographs…it was a diary of memorabilia spanning her whole life.

Then there were the other things. Things which didn’t belong in here. But she’d thrown them in and had locked them away just so they were out of her sight.

The flame burned brighter. She had no control over it. It showed her the Bressingham, her father, Raoul, then the Bressingham again, planting faces, buildings, snatched little scenes into her head like picture postcards, before burning each one of them up in a sheet of fire to replace it with another. She saw herself on her wedding day, dressed in white and smiling. Dressed in black at her father’s funeral and inconsolably sad. A hotel foyer virtually reduced to a pile of rubble. André scowling. Raoul smirking. Typed words written on pieces of paper she couldn’t quite focus on well enough to read.