Her Last Night of Innocence (10 page)

From outside she could hear snatches of conversation in
quick, fluent French. The ache beneath her ribs flared, and she found herself remembering back to the night in Monaco when, rigid with tension, Cristiano had told her how much he’d hated school, how his lack of academic ability had been an acute disappointment to the mother who had made huge sacrifices to give him an education. She should hear him now, Kate thought with a twist of black humour. He was brilliant.

Through the square of window she had a view of him from mid-thigh to waist—his narrow hips and the flat, hard-muscled sweep of his midriff. She looked away quickly, her dry throat aching, her hands knotting together in her lap. Through the anaesthetising horror she felt as if her numb body was crying out for him, desperately craving his strength. His certainty and reassurance.

But since he had discovered she had a child he had withdrawn from her completely. For a moment there, when he had said that about guilt, the dying embers of hope had glowed a little brighter and she had thought that maybe he might be going to let her in again. But then he had slammed the door in her face.

She looked down at her hands. Her skin had a greyish tinge, like the landscape around them, as if all the colour and life had been leached from everything. Unconsciously her fingers had slotted themselves together in an attitude of prayer. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Oh, dear God, please let Alexander be OK,
she mouthed quickly.
Please let me get to him soon.

Opening her eyes, she saw that the policeman had bent down and was peering in at her, obviously thinking she was utterly unhinged. There had been a time when all her prayers had been for Cristiano, but that seemed so foolish now. Foolish and selfish.
If Alexander gets better,
she added silently,
I’ll never ask for anything for myself again
.

She unclenched her fingers, stretching them out until the tendons screamed. What was taking so long? Through the driver’s window she could see Cristiano signing something,
the muscles in his bare forearm flexing beneath the tanned skin as he wrote with a flourish. Handing the piece of paper to the policeman, he shook his hand.

A moment later the door opened and he got in, bringing the scent of outside into the warm fug of the car. There were snowflakes in his hair. Kate felt a wrench of gratitude and compassion as she realized that he was only wearing yesterday’s T-shirt. He must be freezing. Thrusting her hands under her thighs, so she didn’t give in to the temptation to touch him, she looked out of her window.

‘Was that a speeding fine?’

‘No.’ The engine fired with an almighty shudder. ‘An autograph—and the promise of some tickets for the grandstand in Monaco.’

The next moment the throb of the Campano’s engine was almost drowned out by the rising note of the siren starting up. Kate whipped her head round in time to see the police car pull past them and accelerate away. As Cristiano followed, the procession of commuters heading into Lyon, and the holiday-makers with cars laden down with skis and luggage, moved aside to let them past.

They covered the remaining distance quickly, but the wail of the police siren made coherent thought difficult and conversation impossible. That was probably a good thing, Kate told herself, staring straight ahead with aching eyes. What was there to say now?

At the turn-off to the airport the policeman gave a gloved salute through his lowered window and the car fell away, although the sound of the siren still echoed around Kate’s head. Avoiding the queues of cars waiting to get into the main terminal car park, Cristiano took a deserted service road, the roar of the Campano’s engine echoing off the warehouses and hangars on either side as they sped towards a high fence topped with barbed wire.

Security guards carrying radios leapt forward to open gates set into the fence. Beyond them, on the tarmac, a small plane
waited. Kate felt her chest tighten as if concrete were setting in her lungs as Cristiano drove up to it.

He switched off the engine.

The silence rushed in on her, flooding her head. It was like being underwater. The moment had come to leave him, and there was so much she still had to say. But no time to say it. No words.

‘This is it.’

Cristiano’s voice was cool and grave. For a few seconds they both sat motionless, not looking at each other. Kate opened her mouth to speak, but then he was opening the door, getting out, and it was too late.

With stiff fingers she fumbled ineffectually at the doorhandle. She felt paralysed, torn between her desperate need to get to Alexander and her sudden horror at the prospect of leaving Cristiano. Coming around to her side of the car, he opened the door and stood back for her to get out. She did so awkwardly, swaying slightly as she stood up so that he had to grasp her shoulders to steady her.

He let her go quickly. His face was blank, but in that second as the wind caught his hair it was painfully like Alexander’s.

Kate stifled a sob.

‘Time to go,’ he said flatly. A steward was coming down the steps of the plane towards them.

‘Can I have your number?’ she said desperately. ‘I need to see you again, to talk…’

Cristiano took a step backwards. His expression was glacial, haughty, his jaw set hard. He didn’t have to say anything. Everything about him screamed ‘keep away’.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly at the steward to take her bag from the car. His eyes were dark slits in his hard face. ‘It’s over, Kate.’

The words sliced into her like razorblades, reducing her faith and hope and her memories of that other goodbye—the one four years ago, when he had told her to wait for him—to bleeding ribbons. Somehow she made it to the steps of the
plane without looking back, and it was only as it rose into the leaden sky ten minutes later that the tears started to fall.

Closure
—that was what Dominic had told her she needed.

And that was exactly what she had got.

‘M
ENINGITIS
is a nasty illness, but the most crucial thing in fighting it successfully is early diagnosis.’

From across the desk, the sister of the children’s ward smiled kindly. Kate felt she ought to smile back, or give some kind of reply, but it was taking all her strength just to sit there without howling. Fixing her gaze on the collection of cartoon character badges pinned to the front of Sister Watson’s navy blue uniform, Kate tried to concentrate on what she was saying.

‘Alex has been very lucky. Thanks to the prompt actions of Mr and Mrs Hill we were able to perform a lumbar puncture and find out what strain of the disease your son has before it got too much of a grip. We’ve started him on a course of intravenous antibiotics and he seems to be responding well. We should begin to notice an improvement in his condition over the next twenty-four hours.’

The cheerful matter-of-factness of her tone seemed to belong to another situation altogether. In Kate’s shocked, grief-numbed mind it seemed to be entirely inappropriate in view of the fact that Alexander was lying in a small room down the corridor, with tubes coming out of his arms and nose, surrounded by machines.

‘That’s good,’ Kate responded weakly.

‘Of course it is.’ Sister Watson beamed. Her hair was scraped back from a plump, slightly shiny face. ‘Alex is
a very strong little boy, Mrs Edwards. He must get that from you.’

She was trying to be kind. Encouraging. Positive. It would be rude to tell her how wrong she was, or to snap that he wasn’t called Alex. He was
Alexander
—like Alessandro. Cristiano’s middle name.

‘Not from me. From his f-father.’

A wave of clammy nausea washed over her as she wondered where Cristiano was now, and what he was doing. Sister Watson stood up briskly, signalling that the conversation was over and that she had more important things to do than get involved with the personal dramas of feckless single mothers who left their sick children and disappeared abroad.

‘Well, whoever it comes from, it’s a very good thing,’ she said firmly, bustling round the desk to open the door and guide Kate out. ‘He’s not out of the woods yet, but there’s every sign that he’s on the way. And having Mum with him is going to make all the difference. I’m sure he’ll come on in leaps and bounds now you’re here.’

Kate’s boots squeaked on the green linoleum as she walked along the corridor to Alexander’s room. From the walls the painted eyes of the Little Mermaid and various implausible-looking sea creatures seemed to follow her, wide with silent reproach.

Dominic got to his feet from the chair beside Alexander’s bed as she went in.

‘What did she say?’

‘That I’m a neglectful mother and if I’d been here earlier he would be much better by now.’

‘Kate, don’t.’ Dominic sighed.

‘OK, so maybe she didn’t say that exactly.’ Kate walked over to the bed, her heart lurching sickeningly as she tried to find a place on Alexander’s body where she could touch him without disturbing the jungle of tubes and wires. ‘I don’t know what she said. Stuff. Words. “Responding well…not out of the woods…” What do those things mean, Dominic? He looks so…’ Her voice cracked. ‘So…ill’

‘Hey.’ Dominic came round the bed and put his arm around her rigid shoulders. ‘It’s just the machines and things, lovey. He’s doing really well. Just look how peacefully he’s sleeping.’

He didn’t add that Alexander had been screaming the place down earlier, and that it had taken a doctor and three nurses to carry out the lumbar puncture, or that the peaceful sleep was partly due to the morphine drip in his arm. He was shocked by how terrible Kate looked. The doctors seemed to think that Alexander would get through this and recover fully, but Dominic wasn’t so sure that the same could be said of Kate. In that black dress, with her ashen face and the deep shadows beneath her eyes, she looked as if someone had already died.

‘When did it start?’ she rasped through dry lips. ‘How did it happen?’

Dominic sighed, going over to the window. ‘Just like I told you,’ he said wearily. ‘He wasn’t his usual self when he woke up yesterday morning, but we thought it might just be because he was missing you. But then he said he had a headache, and Lizzie noticed that he had a temperature. We gave him paracetamol, and he perked up a bit, but by bedtime he seemed to be worse again. It was Lizzie’s idea to ring the doctor.’

‘I tried to phone.’ Kate closed her eyes in pain as she had a sudden flashback to the kitchen in the chalet, standing at the window watching Cristiano chopping logs, the phone ringing in her hand. ‘I tried to phone last night just to check that everything was OK, but there was no reply.’

‘We didn’t want to lie to you, but we didn’t want to worry you for nothing either. I’m so sorry, Kate, I should have—’

He broke off, rubbing a hand over his face, and for the first time Kate was jerked outside of her own misery enough to notice how tired he looked. His kind, familiar face was pale and unshaven, his hair sticking up where he’d repeatedly run his fingers through it.

Guilt ripped through her.

‘Oh, God, Dominic, I’m so sorry,’ she moaned, carefully
withdrawing her hand from Alexander through the tangle of equipment and going over to where Dominic stood. ‘You and Lizzie have been so good—to have him for me and to go through all this. I can never thank you enough for looking after him and knowing what to do.’ She dropped her head. ‘It’s me I’m angry with. I should never have gone.’

‘Was it worth it?’ Dominic said after a pause. ‘Apart from this, was it worthwhile?’

Kate sucked in a deep breath, feeling lightheaded for a moment as she recalled the bone-melting bliss of being in Cristiano’s arms again. The profound, inexpressible wonder of making love with him. The fierce joy of touching his hair, smelling the scent of his skin, listening to his voice—even though what he’d said had only confirmed her worst fears.

‘Yes.’ Her eyelids flickered for a moment, and then she looked up at Dominic through a haze of pain. ‘Because now I know. There’s no future for us. There never really was.’

It was almost dark by the time Cristiano returned to the chalet. His whole body ached from nine hours out on the mountains, pushing himself—and his luck—harder and further than was safe or sensible.

The delicious lethargy that had gripped him when Kate was here had disappeared at the same time as she did, leaving him with an edgy restlessness that only adrenaline could calm. Or so he’d thought. However, having spent the day hurling himself down black runs, skiing off-piste in a blizzard, and latterly in the gathering dusk as well, he had to admit defeat.

Walking into the warm house, he breathed in the scent of woodsmoke and the lingering traces of red wine and herbs from the meal Kate had cooked the other night—and was almost knocked sideways by the wave of physical longing that smashed into him.

He had to get away from here, he thought irritably, his battered body protesting as he took the stairs two at a time. There was no point in staying. The relaxing break that Francine had
prescribed had ended up being anything but, and he knew he was deluding himself if he thought that his memory was going to come back any time soon.

Or that Kate was.

The thought caught him off guard, and sent another surge of unwelcome lust pulsing through him. He didn’t
want
her to come back, he told himself angrily. It was just because he was bored, stuck here with nothing to focus on, getting restless without the routine of training. Because the pillows still smelled of her hair, and the glass she had drunk from in the hot tub still stood on the bedside table and he hadn’t spoken to another soul since he’d said goodbye to her.

And because he had never been left before. It was always him that did the leaving.

Impatiently he undressed, stripping off his ski gear and stuffing it back into his bag, collecting up the clothes that lay scattered all over the floor and the end of the bed and the chair by the window. Picking up his dress shirt, he paused, closing his eyes and remembering how sweet and sexy she had looked in it as she’d sat cross-legged on the bed, telling him about the night they’d met in Monaco.

Bundling the shirt up, he shoved it viciously into the bottom of the bag, underneath everything else, almost as if that would help him bury the memory and the ache of unfulfilled desire. Turning round, he surveyed the room, checking to see if he’d left anything.

There was something on the floor, sticking out slightly from under the chest of drawers. Cristiano’s head pounded and his stiff shoulders ached as he bent down to pick it up.

A black velvet evening bag.

Perhaps it was Francine’s. Although it was unlikely that she’d use anything so formal out here, he thought, unfastening the catch.

Inside was an invitation to the Campano party at the Casino. Cristiano’s heart skipped as he realised the bag must belong to Kate. Beside the invitation was another piece of paper. He took it out.

It was a letter. Turning it over, he stared hard at the writing on the front of the envelope.

Cristiano Maresca

Personal and Private.

His heart started to beat faster. For a moment he considered ripping it into pieces, or throwing it into the embers of the fire downstairs on his way out.

The coward’s way out
, a cold voice sneered in his head. Mother Superior’s voice.

Gritting his teeth, he sank down onto the bed and tore open the envelope, sliding the paper out and unfolding it with clumsy fingers.

He was shaking now. It wasn’t a long letter, he noted with relief as his eyes scanned quickly over the lines. Kate’s writing was neat and confident.
Clever
, he thought with a stab of bitter self-loathing. Pushing the hair back from his forehead, he focused hard on the strokes her pen had made on the paper, forcing himself to look hard at the individual letters. They jumped slightly in front of his eyes, rearranging themselves.

Dai sbrigati, Cristiano! You’re not trying!

He let out a low curse, tipping his head back and looking around the softly lit bedroom as if to reassure himself that he
wasn’t
back in that classroom, with the Mother Superior standing over him, her cane poised to strike him across the palms of his hands at the next word he got wrong.

Concentrarsi
.

Well, he had come a long way since those days, he thought bitterly. He had taught himself to concentrate to world-championship standard. But it had been hard enough to get the words to keep still and to stay in order in Italian. English was another matter altogether.

Dear Cristiano…

I don’t know if you remember me…

Kate’s voice was in his head as with painstakingly slowness he forced his eyes to move from one word to the next. And suddenly it was as if she was there with him again, smiling that smile that made the dimples appear in her cheeks, looking at him with those gentle blue eyes…

Eyes that would be full of pity and scorn if she really
was
here watching him now, he thought disgustedly, getting abruptly to his feet and tearing the paper in half, and then in half again. He didn’t need to put himself through this—didn’t need to take himself back to that place with its smell of chalk and pencil shavings and feel again the horror of being exposed as stupid. A failure.

Dropping the torn fragments of paper onto the bed, he strode into the bathroom and turned on the cold tap. His reflection in the mirror above the basin shocked him. He was unshaven and hollow-eyed, his hair badly in need of cutting.

You’re a waster, Cristiano. Just like your father. You’ll never amount to anything
.

His mother’s voice this time. He stooped, splashing icy water over his face.
Gesu,
he was going mad. He really needed to get back to Monaco and training. He needed to get back to being the person he’d worked so hard, sacrificed so much to turn himself into—three times World Champion racing driver. Francine had been wrong—he didn’t need to remember, he needed to forget.

Back in the bedroom, he zipped the bag shut and pulled it off the bed. As he did so the torn pieces of the letter fluttered onto the floor like confetti. Impatiently he bent to pick them up, glancing down at the top one as he crossed the room to the door.

He stopped dead, as if he’d just walked into a glass wall. Dropping the bag, he held the fragment of paper in both hands, staring down at it in disbelief as his pulse rocketed and the breath whooshed sickeningly from his lungs.

Ragazzo stupido. Read it again. You’ve got it wrong.
Scowling, he looked at the paper again, staring hard at each word until he could be sure there was no mistake.

You

Have

A

Son.