For His Eyes Only(84)

                ‘Chinese whispers,’ she said, perfectly able to imagine how gossip whispered in the village had been distorted, twisted with every retelling. Garbled, warped...

                ‘He was already back-pedalling, trying to take it back before I’d fired up the bike to go and confront my grandfather, but nothing could unsay those words. I demanded to know the truth and the old man didn’t spare me. He said I was old enough to know the truth and he laid it out in black and white. My father had betrayed his wife, abandoned his unborn child for a—’

                ‘Darius...’

                She’d cut in, not wanting him to repeat the word, but he raised his hand to touch her cheek, looked down at her. ‘Let me finish. Get it out in the light.’ He made a gesture that took in the sagging boathouse, the house out of sight behind the trees. ‘This is all he really cared about. Preserving the house, preserving the name. Nothing that was real.’ He took his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, handed her a photograph. ‘This is what my father cared about.’

                ‘She’s beautiful, Darius.’ The snapshot was of a young woman laughing at something the photographer had said, her eyes filled with so much love that it took her breath away. To be looked at like that... ‘Where did you get this?’

                ‘It arrived in an envelope after my grandmother came to the exhibition. No note.’

                ‘A smile like that against four hundred years of history. No contest.’ She looked up at Darius, at the same dark eyes... ‘She would have come for you. Crawled over broken glass. No piece of paper would have stopped her.’

                ‘Yes. I’ve always known, deep down, that they’re dead but I hoped...’

                ‘Where did you go? How did you live?’ she asked. ‘When you left?’

                ‘Not in a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge,’ he said, apparently reading her mind. ‘I went to Bristol, sold the bike, rented a room, signed on at a sixth form college and got a job stacking supermarket shelves.’

                ‘The bike?’ she said. ‘You told me you walked out!’

                ‘Metaphorically,’ he said, but the darkness had been replaced with the beginnings of a smile. ‘I wanted...I needed you to walk with me.’

                ‘All you had to do was ask.’ For a moment they just looked at one another until it was too intense, too full of the unspoken words in her head and she scrambled for another thought. ‘What happened to Gary?’ she asked, her voice catching in her throat.

                ‘You always go straight to the heart of what’s important, Natasha. I’m banging on about ancient history and you bring me crashing back to earth with what’s real. The human element.’

                ‘I wasn’t dismissing what happened to you. But you said it, Darius. You had everything going for you while he had nothing and I can’t imagine your grandfather was a man to overlook such an indiscretion.’

                ‘You’re right, of course. I didn’t betray Gary but it couldn’t have been anyone else. Mary told me that my grandfather gave him a choice—he left the estate and never returned, or his father and grandmother would lose their jobs and the cottages that went with them.’

                ‘Hurting, angry, lashing out... He made them all pay.’

                ‘If I’d stayed I could have stopped that.’

                ‘How? By bargaining with him? What would you have surrendered to save him?’ He had no answer to that. ‘He would have had you at his mercy, Darius. You were both better off away from here.’