Camellia (58 page)

'I didn't know you could do Irish dancing,' Mel wiped away a lipstick stain from his cheek. 'You're a dark horse.'

'I used to be a bit of a star turn when I was a kid,' he admitted rather shamefacedly. 'Aunt Bridget sent me to classes in Galway. I can't believe I did it tonight though, I must have had one too many whiskies.'

Conrad was supremely happy that night as he fell into his bed. His dreams had become reality. But even as he hugged himself in delight that his restaurant had turned out exactly as he planned, that tonight had been a real success, he recognised that much of his happiness was due to Mel.

From that first night she came for the interview he knew he'd found a friend. After she'd gone he'd been ashamed at himself for gabbling on at her. It was a failing of his: he'd never managed to learn to keep a still tongue and he'd found to his cost that people took advantage of him because of it. But in the three weeks Mel had been here he'd found she wasn't like other people. To her confidences were a disclosure of a person's inner self and as such she treated them as a gift. They worked so well together. He didn't think he'd ever spent so much time laughing in his whole life as he had these last three weeks.

'Bless you Mel,' he whispered in the dark.

On Sunday afternoon Mel decided she must talk seriously to Con. Saturday night had been steady, with people coming in off the street to eat, and they'd had several telephone inquiries with five firm bookings for the next week. Today they'd been closed, but Con had been up at the crack of dawn, darting about, full of wild excitement.

'Can we talk?' she asked, handing him a mug of tea. Since moving all the tables and chairs downstairs they had worked together to make the sitting room a bit more homely. With a second-hand suite from a nearby junk shop, Con's books on shelves on the walls and a carpet, it looked better, but it really needed redecorating. The walls were papered in a hideous salmon pink.

'Don't tell me! It's going to be a "don't count your chickens" pep talk,' he said as she sat down in an armchair opposite him. 'I can't help it, Mel. I'm naturally excitable. It's the Irish blood.'

'No, it's nothing like that,' she said. 'It's about something which happened to me over three years ago. I'm afraid someone might recognise me and tell you. I want you to know the true story just in case.'

Con put his paper down and sat back on the settee. He was back in jeans and his worn Fair Isle cardigan again today, with a dark growth of stubble on his chin. He looked more like a teenager than a man of thirty-two. She hoped her story wasn't going to upset him. He'd led a much more sheltered life than she had.

It was so hard to force herself back in time, to explain who she was then, and why she'd behaved as she had. Looking back at those days in Oakley Street, it all seemed even grubbier than it had at the time. But talking about it was cathartic, like opening a window in a fetid room and airing it.

'Is that all of it?' he said raising one eyebrow when she'd finished. He hadn't interrupted once; she wondered if it had really sunk in.

'Yes.' She hung her head. 'That's what took me off to Ibiza and you know what happened from then on.'

'Mel, don't look so troubled,' he leaned forward and reached out to her hand, covering it with his own. 'We've all done things we wish we hadn't. If I admitted to you some of the things I got into when I was younger, you'd be afraid to be up here with me.'

Somehow she doubted his misdeeds amounted to more than stealing a few sweets from Woolworths, but his chivalry touched her. There was nothing hidden in Con. When he was angry he roared it out, when he was happy he laughed. She knew whatever he had to say on the subject today would be his last word on it. 'Tell me what you really think?' she asked.

He looked at her for a moment, his small face very boyish and innocent. 'I think how lucky I am to have you here working for me and being my friend,' he said at length. 'I think you've worn a hair shirt for too long and that you care far too much about others' opinions. There are people out there who do terrible really wicked things. You were just young, vulnerable and perhaps foolish, that's all.'

'What do I do if someone does recognise me?' she asked. 'Should I be Amelia Corbett? Camellia stands out in people's minds.'

He smiled at her affectionately. 'To me you are just Mel, and that's all anyone needs to know here. But I think you should revert to your real name officially for your own peace of mind. Hiding away behind a false one only brought you more trouble. What is most important though is that you stop worrying about the past. It's over and done with. Just laugh if someone recognises you – there's no need to even think of explaining or admitting anything.'

'What about Magnus and Nick,' she said, tears springing to her eyes. 'I've tried to tell myself I've moved on, that I don't care anymore about them, but that's not true, Con. It still hurts and I feel it isn't ever going to go away.'

Con lapsed into thought. He and Mel were both scarred by bad childhood memories. Even as young as four or five he knew his mother didn't like him the way she did his other brothers and sisters. Being loved by Great-aunt Bridget and his grandfather had made up for it to some extent, especially when his grandfather had made him his heir. Yet deep down he knew that he would rather have heard his mother say she loved him than have any amount of money.

'You have to have faith,' he said eventually, sighing deeply. 'In God, fate or whatever. I personally believe everything is preordained and that we have as little control over our fate as we do over the weather. If you can believe that too and allow yourself to flow with the tide, one day it will turn and you'll find decisions are no longer necessary. Maybe that will mean that you see Magnus and Nick again and resolve everything; maybe you'll just wake up one day and find you really don't care anymore.' He smiled at her. 'Of course that's the easy, lazy Irish way, letting fate take you where it will, but it works for me.'

'How did you get to be so wise?' she asked.

'The same way as you,' Con grinned. 'Too much time spent alone as a child observing others, thinking I was out of step with the rest of the world. I like women very much, but I don't really fancy them. My Aunt Bridget said I should be a priest and perhaps she was right.'

Mel took his hand and squeezed it. She didn't think he meant he was homosexual and she wasn't going to ask. His aunt had hit the nail right on the head: he would make a very good priest.

'I've never had a male friend like you before,' she said very quietly. 'I think you are right too, about fate or whatever it is. That's what brought me here and I'm gladder about that than anything else.'

Chapter Twenty-One

'This is beginning to sound as improbable as one of those old Edgar Wallace mystery films,' Magnus said, leaning on his garden fork and smiling wryly at his son.

It was June, six months since Nick went on his crusade to Littlehampton, Rye and London. Although for most of his time he had been working in London the mysteries surrounding Camellia's birth were still his major preoccupation. Today as he worked alongside his father in the garden he had been airing his theories about Sir Miles and his growing conviction that he'd had Bonny killed to shut her up.

Nick dug his spade deep into the ground, then turned over the clump of soil, bending to pick out a clump of weeds. 'Don't humour me,' he said heatedly. 'Maybe I am getting carried away but we're stuck. You can't have a blood test without a sample of Mel's blood to test alongside it. And even if we hired a private detective to find her, I don't think she'd come back here unless we had some real evidence to show her.'

'I think I'd better have a rest now,' Magnus said, taking off a battered old Panama hat and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. 'My goodness it's hot.'

All through May it had been cold and wet, but the sun had come out at the beginning of June and for the last three days it had grown steadily warmer. Today the temperature was up in the high seventies, and the view across the valley was serene and beautiful in the sunshine.

Nick looked sharply at his father, checking for any signs that might indicate he'd been overdoing it. On the face of it he had made a full recovery from his stroke – he was walking again, albeit with a slight limp and he had regained full use of his left arm – but Nick was still anxious.

It had been a great relief to him when Magnus took on a manageress back in January. Jayne Sullivan, a widow in her early forties, had vast experience in the hotel business. She was efficient, with an outgoing personality, all the staff liked her and she was happy to come to help out at Oaklands for a year or so until she'd decided where she wanted to settle permanently. Nick felt she was heaven sent. Her presence made it easier for Magnus to accept his semi-retirement. Since spring arrived he had spent most of his time pottering in the garden, and the fresh air and light exercise had brought back his old rugged appearance. Few guests realised the big broad-shouldered man with thick white hair, and skin the colour of mellow pine striding around the gardens, was in fact the owner of Oaklands.

Magnus walked over to a garden seat in the shade, picked up a bottle of water he'd left there, took a long drink, then sat down.

Nick continued to dig for a few minutes alone, thinking about his father. The garden had always been very dear to Magnus. But planting flowers and a little weeding was one thing; building a rockery, complete with waterfall was quite another. Nick sensed this sudden desire for a large gardening project was really an attempt to block out the anxiety his father felt for Camellia. Nick knew he couldn't deter him – Magnus was the most stubborn person in the world once he'd decided on something. All Nick could do was to make sure he didn't overture himself.

It pleased Nick to look at his father. He was entirely at one with his surroundings: his worn checked shirt and faded khaki shorts suited his character better than bow ties and dinner jackets. Each deep line on his face, the broad nose, the wide mobile mouth, suggested a life well spent. Age might eventually thin that unruly mop of white hair, his firm straight body might succumb again to stiffness and frailty, but somehow he knew his father's mind would stay active till the last breath left him.

Camellia's disappearance had brought them both anxiety and sorrow, yet it had also brought them far closer. Nick was certain that the reason Magnus had managed to walk again was tied up in his conviction that she would come back before long.

'Let's try another advertisement,' Magnus called out. 'Not everyone reads the personal column in the
Telegraph.'
They had placed two advertisements pleading for her to get in touch, but there had been no response.

Nick dug his spade firmly into the soil and walked over to his father, flopping down on the grass in front of him. 'I don't think she's in England,' he said, picking up the bottle of water. He was stripped down to just a pair of shorts, tanned even darker than his father, his hair bleached white-gold from the sun. He opened the bottle and drank from it. 'I bet she's gone back to Ibiza.'

'She
is
in England,' Magnus replied with conviction. 'I know that person you all call "The Phantom" is her. She's just checking.'

'You think it's Mel?'

'Of course it is.' Magnus wiped his eyes almost angrily. 'Why else does she keep ringing until I answer it? I kept a log for a while and it proves my point. After she's heard my voice it doesn't start again for at least two weeks. She just likes to check I'm okay.'

For a moment Nick just stared at his feet, idly picking some mud off his plimsolls. He trusted his father's intuition. If he was right at least it showed Camellia still thought about them.

'Well if you didn't pick up the phone at all,' he said thoughtfully, 'she might get so anxious she'd come here.'

'I don't want you to use emotional blackmail,' Magnus said sternly. 'That's wrong under any circumstances. And you, my son, are becoming obsessive!'

Nick knew his father was right. Reason told him that it wasn't normal for a man who hadn't had any sort of real relationship with a woman to be so intense about her. Magnus was concerned about her safety, and grieving because he missed her, but Nick was allowing it to dominate his whole life. He knew all those letters by heart now: he had spent hours and hours poring over them, looking for something new he might have overlooked. He had written copious notes on everything he had been told, then questioned each and every known incident.

He was certain that Helena Forester was the person with the answers.

Back in February Nick had joined a repertory company in Bromley in Kent and found himself a tiny flat in Hither Green in South London. It was a great deal easier in London, especially while working in a theatre, to get information about Helena Forester. Posing as an admiring fan and would-be biographer he had collected up scores of press-cuttings, reviews, articles and pictures of her. He knew her favourite perfume, which actors and actresses she admired; he even had pictures of her Spanish-style home in Hollywood. But she was a very private person, almost reclusively so. She rarely gave interviews, she didn't mix with the super rich jet set and she hadn't been back to England for at least twelve years. Considering what a big star she'd been during the fifties and early sixties, she had almost faded from the public eye now. Her last film, in 1967, had been a box office flop. The more he discovered about her the less approachable she seemed.

In one rare in-depth interview way back in 1958, she had talked about her childhood in Stepney before she was evacuated to Suffolk. Her descriptions of the narrow dark streets, the two small rooms she shared with her widowed mother, the colourful neighbours and the appalling poverty were all so vivid, Nick could see, smell and hear the East End. But however bleak her mother's struggle to survive on the meagre wages she got as a theatre dresser sounded – picking up bruised fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden market on her way home, unpicking cast-off clothes to remake them into dresses for her daughter – Helena had clearly been a happy, dearly loved child. She spoke almost nostalgically of day trips to Southend and Epping Forest with her mother and her aunt, of street parties, picnics in the park and the closeness of the slum community.