Where You Belong (6 page)

IV

Rory spotted us as we came slowly up the central aisle. He was waiting to speak to friends of his father's as they left the church, his eyes lit up as soon as they settled on Jake. Moira was positioned next to him, and on his other side stood a slender red-haired woman who even from this distance appeared to be quite beautiful. I knew at once it was Fiona, Tony's former wife. I began to shake inside.

Jake had no way of knowing I had been seized by this internal shaking; nevertheless, he took hold of my elbow to steady me as though he did know.

Fiona was smiling warmly at him, obviously glad to see him, and it was apparent they were old friends. Moving toward her, Jake let go of me only when we came to a standstill in front of her. He wrapped his arms around Fiona and gave her a big bear hug, then hugged Moira and Rory.

Bringing me forward into the group, he introduced me. “Fiona, this is Val—Val Denning.”

“Hello, Val,” she said warmly in a soft voice, and she gave me a small half-smile and thrust out her hand.

I took hold of it and said “Fiona,” and inclined my head, trying not to stare at her. She had a lovely face, with high cheekbones, a dimpled chin, and smooth brow. Her skin was that pale milky white that Irish redheads seem to be blessed with, but it was liberally peppered with freckles across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones. Her hair, cut short and curly, was flame-colored and her eyes were dark, black as coal, in fact. A true Celt, I thought.

“I'm so glad you were able to come to London,” Fiona was saying to Jake in her lilting brogue that bespoke her heritage. “To be honest, I'd worried that you might both be off on assignments, that you wouldn't make the memorial service. Thanks for coming.” She looked at me, and then back at Jake, and said, “So you'll be joining us at the house to take a bite with us?”

Jake hesitated uncertainly, gave me a quick glance, and said to Fiona, “Val hasn't been feeling well since we got here last night, have you, Val?”

He had adroitly thrown the ball into my court, and I had no option but to go along with him. “No, I haven't, not really. I think I must be coming down with something.”

Fiona's face dropped. “Oh, that's such a disappointment, 'tis indeed, Val. And here I was, wanting to give you both something of Tony's. As a memento, you know. There's so much at the house, all of his possessions collected over the years. I thought you could choose something, Val, and you, Jake, something personal, like a camera, or maybe a pair of cuff links.” She paused and shook her head, and a wry smile touched her mouth. “Well, as far as Tony's concerned, there would be nothing more personal than a camera I'm thinking, since every camera he ever owned was part of him.”

“We do want you to come, Jake, you worked alongside Dad for so long. And you should come too,” Rory cut in, looking directly at me. “If you feel up to it. It's not a real wake, you know. It's a sort of . . . well, it's just a gathering of friends remembering my father with his family, in his home—”

“It won't be the same without you,” Fiona interjected. “Why, Jake, you were so close to him these last few years, I thought at times that you were joined at the hip. Please come to the house. It means so much to me and the children.”

Jake said something, but I wasn't paying attention. Instead, I was staring at Fiona. And I knew with absolute certainty that she was not Tony's ex-wife. Fiona was still his wife. Or, rather, his widow.

I

“Tony came to me at the end of July and said he was divorced. Why didn't you tell me he wasn't?” I asked as evenly as possible, trying to keep my voice level and controlled.

“Because I didn't know he wasn't,” Jake answered, returning my stare with one equally as penetrating.

“But why didn't you know? You were his best buddy, and you seem very pally with Fiona. You must have known something, known what was going on in their life together!” I exclaimed, my voice rising slightly.

Jake did not answer.

We stood facing each other in my room at the Milestone, where we had returned after leaving the Brompton Oratory. When truth and reality had suddenly hit me in the face at the church, I had hurriedly excused myself to Fiona, hinting in a vague way that I really wasn't well and had to leave. Under pressure from her, Jake had finally agreed to go to her house once he had dropped me off at the hotel. On the way here in the car, he had tried to talk to me, asking me why I had rushed out so abruptly. But I'd hushed him into silence, explaining that we must wait to have our discussion in private.

Now we were having it. He suddenly reached out, as if to take me in his arms. But as he moved toward me, I took a step backward. “Don't try to comfort me right now,” I said swiftly. “I'm not in the mood, Jake, and anyway, I want to talk this out with you.” I shook my head. “I always thought you were my friend, my best friend, actually, but now . . .” I let my sentence trail off.

Instantly I saw that I had annoyed him. His mouth tightened into a thin line, and his bright blue eyes, usually so benign, had turned flinty and cold. “Don't you dare question my friendship and loyalty!” he said. “And stop being so damned accusatory, Val. I haven't done anything to hurt you, I'm only an innocent bystander. Now listen to me for a moment.”

“I'm listening.”

He took a deep breath and said, “Although Tony and I were close, he never confided in me about his private life, only ever hinted at things. I knew there were lots of women—” He cut himself off, looked chagrined, and eyed me carefully before continuing.

I knew Jake would never willfully hurt me, and I guessed that he was now worrying he had just caused me a degree of pain. But that wasn't so. “It's okay, Jake, keep going,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring voice.

He nodded. “Val, you have to face up to the fact that you weren't the first, there were others before you. But he never left Fiona. She was always there in the background, his childhood sweetheart, his child bride, as he called her, and the mother of his children. She was inviolate in a sense. At least, that's what I believed. As I told you, we never discussed his marriage or his love affairs, just as I didn't talk about my personal life or my divorce from Sue Ellen. We touched on those things only in the most peripheral way. Very casually. Then he got involved with you last year, and eventually I began to think the unthinkable, that he was going to break up with Fiona. Not that he ever said so. Nor did he discuss you. However, when he came to Paris in July, he announced out of the blue that he was divorced—”

“And you were gobsmacked, as the English say,” I interrupted with some acidity.

Ignoring my sarcasm, Jake continued. “You're right, in one sense, yes. Because he was such a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic, I'd always thought a divorce was out of the question. And then again, he'd done something I'd never expected him to do. He'd broken the mold. Mind you, Val, I understood on another level why he would want to be free. It was for you. Yes, I understood that aspect of it very well.”

“He lied to both of us. He wasn't divorced.”

“We don't really know that,” Jake answered in a reasonable tone.

“Oh yes we do. At least I do.”

“I'd like you to consider a couple of things. First, think about Fiona and her demeanor today. She isn't playing the grieving widow. She seems a bit sad, I'll grant you that, but she's not distraught. And second, she's having only a small gathering at the house, just a few friends. In other words, she's not making a big deal out of the memorial.”

“I don't think those are very good arguments.”

“Are you making the assumption they were not divorced just because she talked about Tony's possessions being at the house, and because Rory spoke about Tony as if he lived in the bosom of his family, and very happily so?”

“Perhaps.”

“But those things don't add up to Tony still being married to Fiona when he was killed. Think about it, Val. Even if they were divorced, no one would bring it up today, least of all his son. It just wouldn't have been appropriate or very nice, and anyway, there was no reason to do so. It was a memorial service given by people who loved Tony, and the legal status of their marriage didn't figure into it at all.”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “On the other hand, there's Fiona's attitude toward me. If there'd been a divorce, why was she so nice to me? So pleasant?”

“Because she didn't know you were involved with Tony, that's why.”

“I see.”

“Please don't make the mistake of using her attitude toward you as a yardstick, Val. That would be very flawed judgment on your part.”

I bit my lip and thought for a moment before saying, “Well, I guess the best way, perhaps the only way, to get to the truth is to ask Fiona if she and Tony were divorced.”

“You wouldn't do that!”

“No, I wouldn't. But you could ask her, Jake.”

“Oh, no, not me. And certainly not today of all days.”

I sat down on a chair and dropped my head into my hands. After a minute or two, I looked up at him intently. “Jake, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it as truthfully as you can. It's this: Do you really believe Tony and Fiona were divorced?”

Jake lowered his long, lean frame into the other chair. “Yes, I do,” he answered after giving it some thought. And then he slowly shook his head. A doubtful expression flickered in his eyes. He said, “You know, Val, if I'm absolutely honest, I just don't know whether they were divorced or not. On the other hand, why would he announce it to me as well as to you?” Jake lifted his hands in a helpless sort of gesture and shook his head again. “Why would he invent that? What was his purpose?”

“I don't know. But trust a woman's instincts. The other woman's instincts. They weren't divorced.”

II

I wound up going with Jake to Fiona's house in Hampstead.

He wasn't too happy about this because he was nervous at first, worried that I would verbally accost Fiona. But I promised I wouldn't do that, and he knew I never broke a promise. Also, he understood very well that I would never create an embarrassing scene either.

By the time Jake was leaving my room, I knew I had to go with him, there were no two ways about it. I had to get to the bottom of the situation, find out everything I could without actually asking any direct questions.

It had occurred to me on the drive up to Hampstead with Jake that their home, whether Tony had vacated recently or not, would also tell me a great deal about their relationship. And then there were the children, eighteen-year-old Rory, and Moira, who was twenty. In my experience, children frequently said a lot about their parents, and without actually meaning to they invariably revealed a few secrets. I hoped this would be the case today.

III

Where was the monster? Where was the harridan? Where was the disturbed woman Tony had complained about so often?

Certainly not present today, as far as I could ascertain, not unless Fiona was a superb actress or suffering from a split personality. Could she be a Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde? I was rather doubtful of that. In fact, she appeared to be a pleasant sort of woman who seemed perfectly normal to me.

I knew she was forty, but she didn't look her age at all. A pretty woman, it was her coloring that was the most striking thing about her, and her natural flame-colored hair and bright, dark eyes gave her a kind of vivid radiance. Of medium height and build, she had an innate gracefulness that was most apparent now as she moved around the room, tending to the needs of her guests. Including Fiona and her children, there were eleven of us altogether, since only Niall, his wife, Kate, and several really close friends and colleagues had been invited to the intimate buffet lunch.

I sat on the sofa alone, facing the French doors that led to the garden. Jake was off in a corner, deep in conversation with Rory and Moira, and so I took this opportunity to catch my breath, to relax and review the past few hours. It had been a wild morning. Emotional. Disturbing. And in many ways more dismaying than I'd anticipated.

Outside the windows the scene was pastoral, and I was enjoying sitting there looking at it, enjoying this moment of quietness and solitude in the midst of the gathering. Everyone was engaged in conversation, but this did not bother me; I was part of them, yet separate. I might easily have been in the depths of the country, and not in Hampstead, although parts of this area of London were bucolic, I knew that.

From my position on the sofa I could see a number of large trees, including an oak and a sycamore, and a verdant lawn that was held in check by herbaceous borders. There was an ancient fountain spraying arcs of shimmering water up into the air, and beyond this, a high, old stone wall into which had been set a wrought-iron gate with an elaborate scroll design.

This gate led to an apple orchard, so Fiona had told me a moment ago, and she had added, “Tony's favorite spot. He did love his garden so.”

Nodding, smiling, I had not uttered a word on hearing this. It was something that seemed so unlikely; but I had taken a fast sip of the sherry Jake had poured for me earlier, to be followed quickly by several more sips. Her words had startled me. I had no idea how to respond, and then realized that no response was necessary.

When did he have time to sit in a garden? I asked myself, frowning at Fiona's retreating figure as she flitted away to serve more drinks and questioning the veracity of her remark. Yet there was no reason for her to make this comment if it were not true. What did she have to gain? Nothing, of course. Anyway, it had been said almost offhandedly, as if no thought had been given to it. Nonetheless, I found it curious.

Almost instantly it struck me that he'd had plenty of time to spend in the garden, because he had always hot-footed it to London at the end of an assignment, leaving me and Jake to make our way back to France together.

And Tony had usually had plenty of good reasons for rushing off, ready excuses on the tip of his tongue; he had to check in with his agency, spend time there, see his kids, have lunch with his brother, get a doctor's checkup, go to the dentist. No, he had never been at a loss when it came to explaining away his absence from my life when we were not working.

Tony had been in London through June and most of July, and certainly he could have easily done a lot of garden sitting then. He had not joined us in Paris until the last few days of July, just before we set off for Kosovo in August to cover the war.

Do we ever really know another person? Until earlier today I had believed I knew everything there was to know about Tony Hampton. Not so, it seemed.

I'd had a bit of a shock in the Brompton Oratory, when it had suddenly hit me, and with some force, that I was actually standing next to Tony's widow and not his ex-wife, as I had believed her to be. But the shock had receded somewhat, and I had begun to regain some of my equilibrium.

When I'd rushed out of the church I'd been full of rage; but as the anger had subsided I had accepted the fact that I'd been duped. Not only that, I could also admit to myself that Tony had purposely set out to beguile me last year, and I had been foolishly sucked in, captivated by his Irish charm—if anyone had kissed the Blarney Stone, he had. I had been bowled over by his sudden and rather intense interest in me; it had been so unexpected. After all, he had known me for several years and had always treated me as a pal. Suddenly I was the focus of his romantic and sexual interest, and for a while I was baffled. But he was charismatic, and of course I had not been able to resist his looks, his humor, his cleverness, his sexuality. I had been a sitting duck. . . .

There was something else. I trusted my gut instinct absolutely, and earlier today it had told me Tony had died a married man. I was convinced I was right about that, even if Jake was wavering on this point.

I was baffled by Tony's behavior at the end of July. Why had he unexpectedly announced to Jake that he was divorced? And why had he told me exactly the same thing? I'd certainly not been bugging him about marriage. And who could fathom out a blatant lie like that? What was the motivation behind it? What was the reason for the lie? What had he hoped to gain?

All kinds of other questions jostled for prominence in my mind as I sat there in his house in Hampstead with his widow playing hostess; I went on sipping her dry sherry and pondering my love affair with him.

Had Tony been playing for time? Had he been intending to marry me, as he had often said he would, and in doing so commit bigamy? Had he merely been stringing me along, hoping that Fiona would leave him? Or that I would tire of waiting? Had he found himself in so deep with me, he didn't know how to extricate himself, and therefore had invented the divorce and given me the Grecian ring as . . . pacifiers? Had he been hoping that something would happen to solve his problems?

Tony had had a favorite expression, one he used frequently. “Life has a way of taking care of itself,” he would say to me and others constantly.

Well, life had indeed taken care of itself in the end. Had he always known he would die covering a war? Had he had a presentiment about this? An icy shiver shot through me at this appalling thought, and I immediately put it out of my head. Otherwise, I might start thinking that his recklessness had in some way been calculated. A feeling of dismay mingled with the frustration lodged in the pit of my stomach as I recognized that I would never know what had been in Tony's mind.